[Rd] Signal handling / alarm timeouts

[Murray Stokely]

What are the ramifications of setting up user signal handling to allow
the use of e.g. alarm(2) to send a SIGALRM to the R process at some
number of seconds in the future to e.g. interrupt a routine that is
taking too long to complete.

I can't find any R language support for this (e.g. a timeout argument
to tryCatch() would be ideal), so am wondering what kinds of problems
are to be expected if I do this with native C code in a package.

Are there other ways to accomplish timeouts for blocks of R code like this?

               - Murray