How can I get a precise time, for example in milliseconds in Objective-C?

NSDate and the timeIntervalSince* methods will return a NSTimeInterval which is a double with sub-millisecond accuracy. NSTimeInterval is in seconds, but it uses the double to give you greater precision.

In order to calculate millisecond time accuracy, you can do:

// Get a current time for where you want to start measuring from
NSDate *date = [NSDate date];

// do work...

// Find elapsed time and convert to milliseconds
// Use (-) modifier to conversion since receiver is earlier than now
double timePassed_ms = [date timeIntervalSinceNow] * -1000.0;

Documentation on timeIntervalSinceNow.

There are many other ways to calculate this interval using NSDate, and I would recommend looking at the class documentation for NSDate which is found in NSDate Class Reference.

mach_absolute_time() can be used to get precise measurements.

See http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2004/qa1398.html

Also available is CACurrentMediaTime(), which is essentially the same thing but with an easier-to-use interface.

(Note: This answer was written in 2009. See Pavel Alexeev's answer for the simpler POSIX clock_gettime() interfaces available in newer versions of macOS and iOS.)