Is it true that a timeout wont' work on something blocking on a socket in C code? As I understand it, normally, a thread blocking on IO -- even in C code -- does not prevent context switching to another thread -- such as the timeout thread.

But there are other reasons to avoid the stdlib timeout library, it's true; and also other ways to timeout on a network call, network call API's should offer their own timeout arguments normally.

The fiber scheduler also hooks into the `Timeout` module to provide safe(r) timeouts using the event loop.

Right, don’t use that, but there are well-implemented timeouts in network libraries, etc.