Github user StephanEwen commented on the issue: https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/4616 +1 from my side to merge it like this (using boxed long, dropping the `hasTimestamp()` method. My reasoning is that this is consistent with `ProcessFunction` (like @EronWright said), it is also not in a hot loop and lazily created, so I do not expect a big performance hit. @aljoscha and me talked a lot about the whole design of when records have timestamps and whether in the future we should just assume that records always have timestamps. That biased my towards dropping the `hasTimestamp()` method.
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