Hi
Derick and I are proposing the introduction of a new `Time\Duration`
class to represent “stop-watch” or “egg-timer” durations to improve the
developer experience for APIs taking a timeout. We are specifically
targeting PHP 8.6 for this RFC, since part of the motivation is
improving the API of the new “Polling API” that already landed in PHP
8.6 (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/poll_api) before the “backwards
compatibility” door closes with the feature freeze in two months.
This RFC is also intended to be a first part of a modernized date and
time API in PHP, while being useful on its own. To that extent and given
the deadline we hope to make, the proposed API is intentionally minimal
and focused on functionality that we are relatively certain to:
1. Be correct, or
2. be requirement for future additions that cannot later be added
without breaking compatibility.
We would therefore ask to keep the discussion focused on actual issues
rather than additional “convenience functionality” that might require
extensive discussion or thought.
All that said, you can find the RFC at:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/duration_class. It hopefully includes all the
important explanation and also provides a rationale as to why we made
the design decisions we made.
Best regards
Tim Düsterhus
