So, a portable way to get fractions of a second would be a fine thing (micro seconds will not always be possible; under Dos, e.g., the resolution is 1/18.2 seconds, unless you do direct hardware manipulation)...
If we forget about portability for a minute, under DOS (DJGPP) there is a libc function, uclock (), which provides (very) high-resolution timing.
Jesper Lund