Reminds me of early in my career as I was struggling with turning errors in my code into useful messages to the user. I thought exceptions were so cool and that I could just pop them up the stack and voila `print(err.msg)`.

It took me awhile to realize that good error reporting was part of the UX as much as any other feature I wanted to create for users, and that it deserved a seat at the table of the API interfaces.

I think handling timeouts properly is exactly the same case; like TFA mentioned, there is no such thing as a safe/general way to externally terminate a thread of execution. If you want timeouts to be part of your UX, you need to build it just like any other feature.