How to calculate a time difference in C++

What's the best way to calculate a time difference in C++? I'm timing the execution speed of a program, so I'm interested in milliseconds. Better yet, seconds.milliseconds..

The accepted answer works, but needs to include ctime or time.h as noted in the comments.

Solution 1:

See std::clock() function.

const clock_t begin_time = clock();
// do something
std::cout << float( clock () - begin_time ) /  CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

If you want calculate execution time for self ( not for user ), it is better to do this in clock ticks ( not seconds ).

EDIT:
responsible header files - <ctime> or <time.h>

Solution 2:

I added this answer to clarify that the accepted answer shows CPU time which may not be the time you want. Because according to the reference, there are CPU time and wall clock time. Wall clock time is the time which shows the actual elapsed time regardless of any other conditions like CPU shared by other processes. For example, I used multiple processors to do a certain task and the CPU time was high 18s where it actually took 2s in actual wall clock time.

To get the actual time you do,

#include <chrono>

auto t_start = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
// the work...
auto t_end = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();

double elapsed_time_ms = std::chrono::duration<double, std::milli>(t_end-t_start).count();