You can replace every blocking call with a timed one. In Python you can just call settimeout on a socket. In C you might want to write your own recv_timeout function, but it's not that difficult.
I have no idea how I would use settimeout with a socket to solve any of my problems that involve causing a piece of code to terminate early if it takes longer than a specific amount of time.
If you are using a piece of software which has a part that can take a long time to execute and doesn't allow it to set timeouts for long running operations then i would send a PR to solve that issue.
When said software is closed source and doesn't have that feature then that company sells a problem and not a solution.
What is the code doing? Most of the time it's waiting for a socket. If it's not doing that, do the equivalent for whatever it is waiting for. If it's CPU-bound, add interrupt checks.
