try/catch with timeout

I have an instruction block with communication to external components, enclosed in try/catch. However, instead of throwing an exceptionand skipping to the "catch" part, the execution simply stalls under certain conditions. Is there any way top realize something like

try (max execution time x seconds)
    instructions with possible stall
catch ME
    will be executed either if instructions within try throw an exception or their execution takes more than x s
end

[Rik]

As far as I'm aware, this is only possible by spawning a new process, which then needs to signal to the main process that it is done by writing a file or something similar.