Chaos in the old world! First HipHop, years ago, and no one bats an eye. Then suddenly, HHVM happens, introduces Hack, and all hell breaks loose - Facebook made a new PHP and broke/fixed everything (depending on who you ask). Furthermore, Zephir spawns and threatens with C-level compilation of all your PHP code, with full support for current PHP extensions. It's mushroom growth time for alternative PHP runtimes, and HippyVM appears as well.
Amid the sea of changes, another splash was heard: PHPNG.
As introduced by Manuel Lemos, PHPNG is a new branch of PHP coming to a yet undetermined future version of PHP.
Wait, what?
This somewhat cheesily named (NG = new generation) and clumsily presented version of PHP is the core team's attempt to rival part of what HHVM and Zephir have been doing - improving PHP's performance to levels no other language can catch up with.
Like Manuel says, it was presented by Dmitry Stogov in an internals newsgroup thread. Dmitry is responsible for performance and optimization at Zend, and mostly deals with the Zend Engine. The NG upgrade focuses on rewriting core parts of the Zend Engine to enable better memory allocation on PHP's data types, and on adding JIT compilation similar to HHVM which lets PHP be compiled down to C on execution, improving speed of subsequent runs of the same code.
As with any "Make PHP better" attempt, this one has its pros and cons.
Pros
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