[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: data-timeout - 64-bit timeouts of nanosecond precision

[Mikhail Vorozhtsov]

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