[MLton] Time-limiting a computation?

[William Lovas]

Hey,

This is from Tom Murphy and William Lovas at CMU. We're participating in
the ICFP programming contest this year, and part of what we need to do is
to limit a computation to 5 seconds. (That is, compute better and better
answers to a problem, but definitely report one before 5 seconds is up.)

What's a robust way to do this with mlton? Can we safely use the signal
mechanism? Do we have to be careful about race conditions in that case?  

Tom and William