Compute as much of a list as possible in a fixed time

Question

I want to write a function that takes a time limit (in seconds) and a list, and computes as many elements of the list as possible within the time limit.

My first att

Answer 1

You can implement timeOut with the type you gave using timeout and evaluate. It looks something like this (I've omitted the part that computes how much time is left -- use getCurrentTime or similar for that):

timeoutPure :: Int -> a -> IO (Maybe a)
timeoutPure t a = timeout t (evaluate a)

If you want more forcing than just weak-head normal form, you can call this with an already-seq'd argument, e.g. timeoutPure (deepseq v) instead of timeoutPure v.