---
title: "[RFC] Duration class"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/rfc-duration-class-c8sinqz7q
source_url: https://externals.io/message/131488
type: article
source: "externals.io"
published: 2026-06-23T00:43:24.561Z
updated: 2026-06-23T00:55:45.263Z
tags: ["architecture", "php"]
reading_time: 70
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# [RFC] Duration class

**[externals.io](https://daily.dev/sources/externals)** · 70 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Tim Düsterhus and Derick Rethans have proposed a new `Time\Duration` class for PHP 8.6, designed to represent stopwatch-style or egg-timer durations for use in timeout APIs. The RFC is intentionally minimal, using a seconds + nanoseconds internal representation (similar to Rust's and Java's Duration). Key design decisions discussed include: the highest constructor unit being hours, omitting ISO 8601 serialization for now due to ambiguity, excluding floating-point total methods to avoid precision/rounding issues, using the `Time` namespace (aligned with Rust, Java, and Go conventions rather than JavaScript's Temporal), and accepting only ISO 8601 'Period' strings starting with 'PT'. Community feedback raises questions about add/sub vs. a variadic sum method, namespace choice, and whether to adopt the temporal_rs Rust library instead of building a new API from scratch.

## Full article

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---

Tags: [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#php](https://daily.dev/tags/php)

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