Tomasz Zielonka writes:
Did you consider using floating-point Timeout type, with its values representing seconds, possibly fractional? This could have some negative performance impact, but would be elegant IMHO.
It certainly is more elegant, but I personally would rather not have these calculations from Double to Int in the low-level routines. I think it would be better to wrap 'timeout' with a separate function which does this, so that people can choose whether they'd like to specify the timeout in microseconds or in a fraction of seconds. Thinking about it, these conversions would probably be useful on their own right, independently from any timeout functions.
2^31 microseconds is not such long
You are right, that's less than 36 minutes. Quite surprising. I've added an appropriate warning to the documentation -- thanks for the hint! Peter