Timing a section of code in C++

Sometimes it's useful to measure how long a certain part of your C++ code takes to execute. Here's a little utility class that makes this extremely easy. It can be used like this:

void foo() {
    TimedSection s("foo()");
    // do some long operation...
}

Calling foo() will print something like this to stderr:

foo()   336.856127 ms

As you may have guessed, a TimedSection records the time between its construction and its destruction. Since C++ has no garbage collection, destructors are called at a deterministic moment: when the local object (called s above) goes out of scope. If you want to time a section that is not a scope by itself, you can introduce a pair of braces to scope the object. If the section is even more complex (e.g. spanning multiple functions), you can use new and delete, but that destroys the elegant simplicity of TimedSection's usage.

The implementation is rather simple as well:

#include <iostream>
#include <ctime>

class TimedSection {
    char const *d_name;
    timespec d_start;
    public:
        TimedSection(char const *name) :
            d_name(name)
        {
            clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &d_start);
        }
        ~TimedSection() {
            timespec end;
            clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &end);
            double duration = 1e3 * (end.tv_sec - d_start.tv_sec) +
                              1e-6 * (end.tv_nsec - d_start.tv_nsec);
            std::cerr << d_name << '\t' << std::fixed << duration << " ms\n"; 
        }
};

I hereby release this little code snippet into the public domain. Enjoy!