How to measure time in milliseconds using ANSI C?

There is no ANSI C function that provides better than 1 second time resolution but the POSIX function gettimeofday provides microsecond resolution. The clock function only measures the amount of time that a process has spent executing and is not accurate on many systems.

You can use this function like this:

struct timeval tval_before, tval_after, tval_result;

gettimeofday(&tval_before, NULL);

// Some code you want to time, for example:
sleep(1);

gettimeofday(&tval_after, NULL);

timersub(&tval_after, &tval_before, &tval_result);

printf("Time elapsed: %ld.%06ld\n", (long int)tval_result.tv_sec, (long int)tval_result.tv_usec);

This returns Time elapsed: 1.000870 on my machine.

#include <time.h>
clock_t uptime = clock() / (CLOCKS_PER_SEC / 1000);

I always use the clock_gettime() function, returning time from the CLOCK_MONOTONIC clock. The time returned is the amount of time, in seconds and nanoseconds, since some unspecified point in the past, such as system startup of the epoch.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <time.h>

int64_t timespecDiff(struct timespec *timeA_p, struct timespec *timeB_p)
{
  return ((timeA_p->tv_sec * 1000000000) + timeA_p->tv_nsec) -
           ((timeB_p->tv_sec * 1000000000) + timeB_p->tv_nsec);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  struct timespec start, end;
  clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &start);

  // Some code I am interested in measuring 

  clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &end);

  uint64_t timeElapsed = timespecDiff(&end, &start);
}

The best precision you can possibly get is through the use of the x86-only "rdtsc" instruction, which can provide clock-level resolution (ne must of course take into account the cost of the rdtsc call itself, which can be measured easily on application startup).

The main catch here is measuring the number of clocks per second, which shouldn't be too hard.

As of ANSI/ISO C11 or later, you can use timespec_get() to obtain millisecond, microsecond, or nanosecond timestamps, like this:

#include <time.h>

/// Convert seconds to milliseconds
#define SEC_TO_MS(sec) ((sec)*1000)
/// Convert seconds to microseconds
#define SEC_TO_US(sec) ((sec)*1000000)
/// Convert seconds to nanoseconds
#define SEC_TO_NS(sec) ((sec)*1000000000)

/// Convert nanoseconds to seconds
#define NS_TO_SEC(ns)   ((ns)/1000000000)
/// Convert nanoseconds to milliseconds
#define NS_TO_MS(ns)    ((ns)/1000000)
/// Convert nanoseconds to microseconds
#define NS_TO_US(ns)    ((ns)/1000)

/// Get a time stamp in milliseconds.
uint64_t millis()
{
    struct timespec ts;
    timespec_get(&ts, TIME_UTC);
    uint64_t ms = SEC_TO_MS((uint64_t)ts.tv_sec) + NS_TO_MS((uint64_t)ts.tv_nsec);
    return ms;
}

/// Get a time stamp in microseconds.
uint64_t micros()
{
    struct timespec ts;
    timespec_get(&ts, TIME_UTC);
    uint64_t us = SEC_TO_US((uint64_t)ts.tv_sec) + NS_TO_US((uint64_t)ts.tv_nsec);
    return us;
}

/// Get a time stamp in nanoseconds.
uint64_t nanos()
{
    struct timespec ts;
    timespec_get(&ts, TIME_UTC);
    uint64_t ns = SEC_TO_NS((uint64_t)ts.tv_sec) + (uint64_t)ts.tv_nsec;
    return ns;
}

// NB: for all 3 timestamp functions above: gcc defines the type of the internal
// `tv_sec` seconds value inside the `struct timespec`, which is used
// internally in these functions, as a signed `long int`. For architectures
// where `long int` is 64 bits, that means it will have undefined
// (signed) overflow in 2^64 sec = 5.8455 x 10^11 years. For architectures
// where this type is 32 bits, it will occur in 2^32 sec = 136 years. If the
// implementation-defined epoch for the timespec is 1970, then your program
// could have undefined behavior signed time rollover in as little as
// 136 years - (year 2021 - year 1970) = 136 - 51 = 85 years. If the epoch
// was 1900 then it could be as short as 136 - (2021 - 1900) = 136 - 121 =
// 15 years. Hopefully your program won't need to run that long. :). To see,
// by inspection, what your system's epoch is, simply print out a timestamp and
// calculate how far back a timestamp of 0 would have occurred. Ex: convert
// the timestamp to years and subtract that number of years from the present
// year.

For a much-more-thorough answer of mine, including with an entire timing library I wrote, see here: How to get a simple timestamp in C.

@Ciro Santilli Путлер also presents a concise demo of C11's timespec_get() function here, which is how I first learned how to use that function.

In my more-thorough answer, I explain that on my system, the best resolution possible is ~20ns, but the resolution is hardware-dependent and can vary from system to system.