timeout

[simons]

forkChild is a variant of forkIO that spawns a concurrent "IO a" computation, and returns a "Child a" handle that can be used to obtain the "a" value once the computation has terminated.

parIO is a combinator that runs two "IO a" computations concurrently and returns the "a" value of the computation that terminates first.

timeout wraps an "IO a" computation to "IO (Maybe a)" and returns "Nothing" if the computation doesn't terminate within a specified time period.

[simons]

There was no interest in parIO or any of the other primitives.

Over the course of the discussion, a very nice timeout implementation emerged in  http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2006-November/006238.html, but no-one found the time to prepare it for submission to the libraries.

[simonmar]

Now done.