Setting timeout limit on Windows

Question

I have a function that should not take too long to run. I would like to set a timeout limit on it. I can find one proposed solutions on the internet. See the following SO post. Timeout on a function call

The solution uses signals, which is not available on Windows. There is a similar use of signals for making a ticker, which has a windows port as explained on this SO post: python: windows equivalent of SIGALRM this is not an answer to the timeout directly, but could be adapted to work for timeouts. It is written for python 2.7 though.

Since the answers are roughly 10 years old, my question is: Is there any more modern python (e.g. python 3.7) way to create a context manager/decorator/similar wrapper do make a "normal function" into a timeout-limited function on a windows system?

Answer 1

Here's a way to convert @Praveenkumar's answer into an easy-to-use decorator, which it seems you now would like to know:

import time
import concurrent.futures as futures


def timeout(timelimit):
    def decorator(func):
        def decorated(*args, **kwargs):
            with futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=1) as executor:
                future = executor.submit(func, *args, **kwargs)
                try:
                    result = future.result(timelimit)
                except futures.TimeoutError:
                    print('Timedout!')
                    raise TimeoutError from None
                else:
                    print(result)
                executor._threads.clear()
                futures.thread._threads_queues.clear()
                return result
        return decorated
    return decorator


@timeout(3)
def test(n):
    print(f'Sleeping for {n} seconds')
    time.sleep(n)
    # Real code here.
    return 'Done'

test(2)  # OK
test(5)  # -> Causes timeout.