Hi Sam
Please do not "top-post" on this mailing list. This means: Please put
your reply below the quoted part and ideally also cut the quoted part to
the minimum context that you actually want to reply to. You can see how
I did this in my first reply to you and also in this reply.
On 2/8/25 18:16, Sam Lewis wrote:
That's fair, maybe that will increase the value proposition of the RFC
enough to be worth considering more seriously.
A well-designed “Units extension” would certainly be more valuable that
adding a few functions without a clear plan / proper API design. But it
would probably still be something that would better be solved in
userland as a composer library. Unit conversions functions will likely
not experience a relevant performance improvement when implemented
natively, they are not particularly hard to implement with regard to
edge cases so that they would warrant a “well-tested” and “blessed” core
implementation and they are unlikely to be so commonly used that they
need to *always* be available. Having them in a userland API would also
allow them to move more quickly: New units could be added on-demand,
rather than being restricted to a once-per-year release cycle.
The type of functionality that is nowadays added to PHP’s standard
library is “building block” functionality: Functions that a userland
developer would commonly need in their custom library or application.
The `array_find` functions added in PHP 8.4 are a good example. It's
something that every major framework already implements in one way or
another, it fits with the existing `array_filter` functionality and it's
so generically useful that many libraries benefit from it.
The same is true for `Randomizer::getBytesFromString()` added in PHP
8.3. It's also commonly implemented and as it turns out, it is very
susceptible to being incorrectly implemented (due to off-by-one errors).
For that there's also the existing Randomizer class which a clear API
design and scope so that the function fits in nicely with the existing API.
Best regards
Tim Düsterhus
