Cross-platform time out decorator

[Joel]

On Sep 27, 10:40 pm, "Chris Mellon" <arka... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/27/07, Hrvoje Niksic <hnik... at xemacs.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Joel <joel.schae... at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > >> Note that, unlike the original alarm code, it doesn't really interrupt
> > >> the timed-out method, it just returns the control back to the caller,
> > >> using an exception to mark that a timeout occurred.  The "timed out"
> > >> code is still merrily running in the background.  I don't know if it's
> > >> a problem in your case, but it's an important drawback.
>
> > > There should be a method to stop the thread though?
>
> > Not in Python.  Thread killing primitives differ between systems and
> > are unsafe in general, so they're not exposed to the interpreter.  On
> > Windows you can attempt to use ctypes to get to TerminateThread, but
> > you'll need to hack at an uncomfortably low level and be prepared to
> > deal with the consequences, such as memory leaks.  If the timeouts
> > happen rarely and the code isn't under your control (so you have no
> > recourse but to terminate the thread), it might be worth it though.
> > --
>
> You can use ctypes and the Python API to raise a Python exception in
> the thread.

Could you point me to an example of how to do that?

> I don't normally mention this, because it has some
> limitations, but it results in essentially the same effect as the
> signal based method. They both have the limitation that C code can't
> be interrupted.