How to count time in seconds in Allegro 5

Question

I've got a problem with counting time in Allegro5. I have to do project to school where I'll show shellsort, how it works and how fast it sort array and there is a problem

I dunno how to count time in seconds, I did some code like this but wont work

ALLEGRO_TIMER *shellTimer = al_create_timer(1.0);
al_start_timer(shellTimer);

// ALGORYTM SHELLA
while (distance) {
    shellCounter++;
    for (int j = NUMBER_OF_ELEMENTS - distance - 1; j >= 0; j--) {
        pos = array[j];
        i = j + distance;
        shellCounter += 2;
        while ((i < NUMBER_OF_ELEMENTS) && (pos > array[i])) {
            array[i - distance] = array[i];
            i += distance;
            counter += 2;
        }
        array[i - distance] = pos;
        shellCounter++;
    }
    distance /= 3;
    shellCounter++;
}

shellTime = al_get_timer_count(shellTimer);
al_stop_timer(shellTimer);

It does nothing when I execute it, the shellTime variable is an int64_t

General solutions can be see in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/997946/how-to-get-current-time-and-date-in-c — Mihai8, May 18 '19 at 10:41
No the post @user1929959 provided points to C++ example. Not C. — Irelia, May 18 '19 at 13:24
When your timer is set to count seconds, it probably hasn't even ticked by the time your code finishes executing. See my answer below. — BugSquasher, May 31 '19 at 16:57

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '19 at 03:44

You can use al_get_time to get the current time in seconds, but allegro timers are only as accurate as the underlying os clocks are.

What you really want is a high performance timer for this situation. Look at Query performance counter

on Windows and clock_gettime on Linux

They will give you nanosecond accuracy

How to count time in seconds in Allegro 5

1 Answers1