Native Cron Job Scheduling Support in PHP Core

[gavriel-adi]

As PHP continues evolving towards more modern and asynchronous capabilities, I believe it’s time to consider native support fo
r scheduled background tasks — essentially a built-in cron job system.

Currently, developers rely on external cron or task schedulers at the OS level or tools like php-cron-scheduler. While effective, these solutions are not always accessible or intuitive, especially for beginners or in shared hosting environments without cron access.

Proposal: Introduce a native scheduling interface or runtime task manager, perhaps via a new API like php_schedule('*/5 * * * *', function() { ... });. This could optionally integrate with the PHP CLI server, FPM, or a long-running worker process.

Benefits:

Simplifies background task setup for PHP-based applications

Enables more powerful CLI tools and async job handling

Enhances developer experience for platforms like Laravel, Symfony, and WordPress

Reduces reliance on OS-level configuration

Would love to hear thoughts, challenges, and ideas on this — could this be part of the true_async movement too?