Yeah, that would be exactly what I was asking about, I just hoped for something less dramatical (without die), but that's good enough, I can always wrap all that code in eval and just catch this 'die'.

Thanks.

Interestingly this works well with Event, I was affraid it wouldn't (Event uses timeout handling written in C, but it seems like it's alarm based). Here's the final code:

use Event;
use Event::Stats;
Event::Stats::enforce_max_callback_time(1);

sub callback {

 for (1..int(rand(999))) {
 alarm(10);
 sleep 2;#relatively long running tast
 };
};

$Event::DIED = sub {
        Event::verbose_exception_handler(@_);
        Event::unloop_all();
}; # just die

Event->idle(min=>1,max=>2,cb=> \&callback,max_cb_tm=>10,);
Event::loop();
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