Support for timeout like in axios

[germanviscuso]

See: axios/axios#1503
Being able to pass a timeout to the async call is convenient.

[mikeal]

Can’t you just wrap it in a generic promise timeout library?

[germanviscuso]

This ibrary helps abstract the developer from thinking in promises terms. Look at the usage example, no (explicit) promises:

const bent = require('bent')

const getJSON = bent('json')
const getBuffer = bent('buffer')

let obj = await getJSON('http://site.com/json.api')
let buffer = await getBuffer('http//site.com/image.png')

hence IMHO it would be helpful to be able to do something like this (async/wait style, no promises, no extra lines of code except for the try/catch):

try {
  await getJSON('http://site.com/json.api', 5000); // 5 sec timeout
} catch(error) {
  // determine if error was from a timeout or not
}

[mikeal]

With browser support being quite good now and the bundle size being low, I’m not going to be adding features that increase the bundle size if they can easily be accomplished by pulling in other modules.

[mpareja]

Cross-posting from #59:

Ancillary libraries for handling timeouts are insufficient without bent providing a mechanism to reclaim resources.

The request timeout implementation, for instance, aborts the request resulting in the TCP socket being torn down - that's important on a server. bent doesn't support setting a timeout nor gives us access to node's ClientRequest instance, so we won't have any way to tear down the TCP connection when using a timeout library.

Please consider re-opening this issue or warning others about this.