Following the recent proposals and work done around the new `Duration` API, I wanted to propose having a function available for converting a `Duration` into a specific time unit, returning a float value.
I see this function being useful where in your system you want to work with durations, but on inputs and outputs, you are required to convert this duration into a more plain value. The examples I can think of are 1) having an Ecto custom type that loads a value in seconds (or another unit) from the database, converting it into a duration using `Duration.new!(second: value)` and dumps a duration again into a value in seconds by calling `Duration.to_float(duration, :second)` and 2) transforming a duration into a plain number in Phoenix HTML inputs. Examples of similar APIs I could find are in the JavaScript Temporal.Duration <https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/duration.html#total> API or Ruby ActiveSupport::Duration <https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Duration.html#method-i-in_days:~:text=in_days,%20in_hours,%20in_minutes,%20in_months,%20in_seconds,%20in_weeks,%20in_years> . One challenge we may encounter when implementing this function is calculating, for example, how many seconds there are in a year. For this, I think we can rely on the Calendar APIs? Thoughts? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elixir-lang-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/f11b73c0-b709-4fbe-94fe-f76412f7a14cn%40googlegroups.com.
