From the article's first paragraph: > The use case is something like this: you spawn a subprocess, and you expect the subprocess to complete within ten seconds

From the article's first paragraph: > The use case is something like this: you spawn a subprocess, and you expect the subprocess to complete within ten seconds. If it doesn’t complete in that time, you want to treat it as an error (and perhaps kill the child). I've had this exact use case myself, several times. It's painful.