This is very true. Most examples of async io I've seen - regardless of the framework - gloss over timeouts and cancellation. It's really the hardest part. Reading and writing asynchronously from a socket, or whatever, is the straightforward part.

You can set read and write timeouts on TCP sockets:

https://linux.die.net/man/3/setsockopt

Zig has a posix API layer.

I don't have a good answer for that yet, mostly because TCP reads are expected to be done through std.Io.Reader which isn't aware of timeouts.

What I envision is something like `asyncio.timeout` in Python, where you start a timeout and let the code run as usual. If it's in I/O sleep when the timeout fires, it will get woken up and the operation gets canceled.

I see something like this:

    var timeout: zio.Timeout = .init;
    defer timeout.cancel(rt);

    timeout.set(rt, 10);
    const n = try reader.interface.readVec(&data);