Tim Düsterhus and Derick Rethans are proposing a new `Time\Duration` class for PHP 8.6 to represent stopwatch-style durations, primarily to improve the developer experience for timeout-related APIs like the new Polling API. The RFC is intentionally minimal, using a seconds+nanoseconds internal representation (similar to Rust's and Java's Duration). Community discussion covers design questions including: why the highest constructor unit is hours, the absence of an ISO 8601 serialization method (deferred to PHP 8.7), omission of floating-point total methods due to precision concerns, namespace choice (`Time` vs `DateTime`), and whether to use `add`/`sub` methods or a single variadic `sum` method. The authors also explain why they chose not to adopt the JavaScript Temporal API or the `temporal_rs` Rust library, citing PHP's semantic closeness to Java and the complexity of integrating Rust into the Zend Engine.
