Question

Is there any portable (Windows & Linux) way of counting how many milliseconds elapsed between two calls ?

Basically, I want to achieve the same functionnality than the StopWatch class of .NET. (for those who already used it)

In a perfect world, I would have used boost::date_time but that’s not an option here due to some silly rules I’m enforced to respect.

For those who better read code, this is what I’d like to achieve.

Timer timer;

timer.start();
// Some instructions here
timer.stop();

// Print out the elapsed time
std::cout << "Elapsed time: " << timer.milliseconds() << "ms" << std::endl;

So, if there is a portable (set of) function(s) that can help me implement the Timer class, what is it ? If there is no such function, what Windows & Linux API should I use to achieve this functionnality ? (using #ifdef WINDOWS-like macros)

Thanks !

Answer 1

On Linux (and generally in POSIX), you can use gettimeofday function, which returns number of microseconds since the Epoch. On Windows, there is GetTickCount function, that return number of milliseconds since the system was started.