title: PhalconPHP vs Slim
body: <p>I'm currently planning to develop a REST API for my applications, and I've been looking a lot at existing PHP frameworks, but also existing solutions to speed up PHP execution.</p>
  
  <p>My goal here is to get the best performance, but also without compromising development speed.</p>
  
  <p>I've been hesitating between two:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>PhalconPHP (using only the Micro application)  </li>
  <li>Slim + Doctrine2 ORM</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I read some articles about PhalconPHP and it seems really fast as it's written in C as a PHP extension. But I do prefer Doctrine2's ORM.</p>
  
  <p>Also, Slim is by itself really fast, and I took a look also on HHVM by Facebook, in order to speed up PHP execution.</p>
  
  <p>What I'm wondering:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>If I do use Doctrine2 ORM in place of Phalcon's native ORM, will Doctrine2 slow down the application, as it's not written in C like Phalcon's one ?</p></li>
  <li><p>Is Phalcon's native ORM worth it ?</p></li>
  <li><p>If I use Slim, will I miss some important features that could slow down the development process ? I do understand it's a micro-framework, and that's what I want: use multiple smalls components in order to build my application stack, but will I miss out some great features available in PhalconPHP ?</p></li>
  <li><p>PhalconPHP vs Slim personnal opinion ? In order of development speed, but also scalability/performance</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Also, I saw this issue: <a href="http://forum.phalconphp.com/discussion/6303/low-performance-of-orm" rel="nofollow">Phalcon's ORM is slow</a>. Don't know what you think about this?</p>