How difficult would it be to add a timeout to "wait"?

[Dale R. Worley]

How difficult would it be to add an optional timeout argument to the
"wait" builtin?

I occasionally run into situations where this functionality is
desirable, more often than I expect, really.  And though the last thing
Bash needs is an additional feature, naively it seems like it wouldn't
be too difficult.  E.g. "read" already has a timeout feature.

But I looked into the code, and all the variations and implementations
of "wait" map reasonably directly into one or another of the Posix
"wait" calls.  I'm no expert there, but I tried looking and there
doesn't seem to be any version of those that allows the program to
specify a timeout time.  I considered setting an alarm() before calling
wait() but a quick look on Stack Overflow said that is a good way to
lose the status information from child jobs.

Dale