Hi. I grew up tired of counting milliseconds, so I wrote a small library[1] that allows me to specify time units for timeouts and convert between them. The library also provides wrapped versions of 'timeout' and 'threadDelay' functions:
threadDelay $ 1 # Minute + 30 # Second
Nanosecond precision seems to be enough for RTS and POSIX calls and it also provides a good range for 64-bit representation:
maxBound :: Timeout 30500 w 3 d 23 h 34 m 33 s 709 ms 551 us 615 ns
One thing that might disappoint some people is that I chose unsigned underlying type (Word64), which means that "infinite" timeouts cannot be represented. I think "negative" timeouts essentially are performance warts (a way of packing `Maybe Word63` into Word64) that muddle equality and I recommend using `Maybe Timeout` whenever timeout is optional. [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/data-timeout