Hello world, it's Wednesday, July 22, 2026, and here's what happened This Week in PHP Internals.
20 stories this week, so let's get into it. But first, This week's episode is brought to you by Tideways. Slow requests, and no clear reason why? Tideways helps you understand exactly where your PHP application spends its time — profiling, tracing, and monitoring to find and fix bottlenecks faster. And your profiling data stays hosted in Germany — GDPR-friendly by default. Learn more at tideways.com.
This week's top story: the season's first ballots are open — 2 sets of them — and the early counts are lopsided. Tim Düsterhus opened voting on the Time\Duration class on Friday with 2 ballots: a primary, needing a 2/3 majority, and a secondary choosing between full and abbreviated method names. As of recording, the primary stands at 23 to 1, and full names lead 18 to 1 — so multiplyBy and divideBy, not mul and divBy. Voting closes July 31. And remember Pierre Joye, who last week was leaning no over fromSeconds() and its capped nanoseconds argument? This week he closed the loop and voted yes, writing: "We were like ships passing in the night for some of my disagreements. The RFC wiki page did not show the additional constructor for other units, which hence the inconsistency I pointed out for the extra [nanoseconds] argument in fromSecond. They are here, and reduce this down to a lower level of bad APIs, more a pragmatic compromise conciliating different (if not numerous) use cases. Anything can be perfect, or shipped. Choose one." It turns out the per-unit constructors that resolved his objection had been in the RFC all along. His ballot almost didn't register, though — each vote on the wiki is a separate form, and Tim had to point out that you submit each one individually. The count now includes him.
