Timing in an elegant way in c++

Question

I am interested in timing the execution time of a free function or a member function (template or not). Call TheFunc the function in question, its call being

Answer 1

I'm a fan of using RAII wrappers for this type of stuff.

The following example is a little verbose but it's more flexible in that it works with arbitrary scopes instead of being limited to a single function call:

class timing_context {
public:
  std::map timings;
};

class timer {
public:
  timer(timing_context& ctx, std::string name)
    : ctx(ctx),
      name(name),
      start(std::clock()) {}

  ~timer() {
    ctx.timings[name] = static_cast(std::clock() - start) / static_cast(CLOCKS_PER_SEC);
  }

  timing_context& ctx;
  std::string name;
  std::clock_t start;
};

timing_context ctx;

int main() {
  timer_total(ctx, "total");
  {
    timer t(ctx, "foo");
    // Do foo
  }

  {
    timer t(ctx, "bar");
    // Do bar
  }
  // Access ctx.timings
}

The downside is that you might end up with a lot of scopes that only serve to destroy the timing object.

This might or might not satisfy your requirements as your request was a little vague but it illustrates how using RAII semantics can make for some really nice reusable and clean code. It can probably be modified to look a lot better too!