How to isolate your program from calls to a “bad” API?

Question

When I developed a piece of (academic) software using Java, I was forced to use an API that was rather badly implemented. This means that calls to this API for a certain set

Answer 1

I'm a big fan of separate processes for this kind of thing.

Spawn a sub process and wait for results.

If the API is non-deterministic, put the timer thread in a wrapper that makes the bad API into a main program.

That way, the subprocess always ends within the given time. It either produces a useful result or a system exit code that indicates failure.