[revelation]

A time limit on something like this is so extremely awkward to use. My first problem would be that I'm concerned the implementation doesn't have the resolution; a "reasonable" time limit would be what, 1us for a regex match?

Which brings us to the second point: what's this, wall clock time, CPU time? I risk testing this with low load on my dev computer only to have it fail in production because high CPU load means the match just took longer (but wasn't running into a corner case).

I think a reasonable "timeout" would be to give an upper limit for character array accesses, like 20*strlen.