PHP 8.6 Introduces Standard SortDirection Enum and Time\Duration Class

PHP 8.6 introduces two standard-library types: the SortDirection enum and the Time\Duration class. SortDirection contains two cases, Ascending and Descending, and no other behavior. A GitHub search found over 150 separate, incompatible versions of this type.

Time\Duration represents a time span from one nanosecond to more than a hundred years with nanosecond precision. It provides named constructors like Time\Duration::fromMilliseconds(250) and exposes values via ->seconds, ->nanoseconds, and a ->negative flag. The Streams Project polling API accepts it in PHP 8.6.

PHP expresses time in at least six ways across functions like sleep(), CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS, usleep(), hrtime(), stream_set_timeout(), and microtime(true). Sorting direction also uses scattered integer constants, separate functions, userland strings, and booleans.

Tim Düsterhus and ext/date maintainer Derick Rethans had about two months from proposal to feature freeze to complete the work, with Tideways sponsoring part of Düsterhus's time. The Time\Duration RFC kept a narrow scope to avoid large APIs that remain nuisances for decades.

The types use new namespaces, following a pattern set by Random\* in PHP 8.2, Dom\* in PHP 8.4, and Uri\* in PHP 8.5.

A future RFC covering Time\Instant and a Time\Clock interface is under discussion on PHP Internals.