Here's a small function I use, taken from the book "Developing Applications with Objective Caml"

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/html/book-ora168.html

exception Timeout
let sigalrm_handler = Sys.Signal_handle (fun _ -> raise Timeout)
let timeout (time : int) (f : 'a -> 'b) (arg : 'a) =
   let old_behavior = Sys.signal Sys.sigalrm sigalrm_handler in
   let reset_sigalrm () = ignore (Unix.alarm 0); Sys.set_signal Sys.sigalrm old_behavior in
   ignore (Unix.alarm time) ;
   let res = f arg in reset_sigalrm () ; res

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 8:18 PM, Rodolphe Lepigre <rodolphe.lepigre@univ-savoie.fr> wrote:

I was wondering: is there a standard way to stop a computation after, say,
a given number of milliseconds (or seconds) in OCaml?

For instance I would like to have a function

exception Timeout
val exec : int -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'b

such that [exec t f x] computes [f x] but raises [Timeout] in case the
computation did not end before [t] milliseconds (or seconds).

My guess would be that I need to use some Unix signals magic. Has anyone
come up with a clean solution to this problem?

Thanks!

Rodolphe
--
Rodolphe Lepigre
LAMA, Université de Savoie, FRANCE
http://lama.univ-savoie.fr/~lepigre/

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