How to make thread sleep less than a millisecond on Windows

Question

On Windows I have a problem I never encountered on Unix. That is how to get a thread to sleep for less than one millisecond. On Unix you typically have a number of choices (sleep, usleep and nanosleep) to fit your needs. On Windows, however, there is only Sleep with millisecond granularity.

On Unix, I can use the use the select system call to create a microsecond sleep which is pretty straightforward:

int usleep(long usec)
{
    struct timeval tv;
    tv.tv_sec = usec/1000000L;
    tv.tv_usec = usec%1000000L;
    return select(0, 0, 0, 0, &tv);
}

How can I achieve the same on Windows?

Answer 1

On Windows the use of select forces you to include the Winsock library which has to be initialized like this in your application:

WORD wVersionRequested = MAKEWORD(1,0);
WSADATA wsaData;
WSAStartup(wVersionRequested, &wsaData);

And then the select won't allow you to be called without any socket so you have to do a little more to create a microsleep method:

int usleep(long usec)
{
    struct timeval tv;
    fd_set dummy;
    SOCKET s = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);
    FD_ZERO(&dummy);
    FD_SET(s, &dummy);
    tv.tv_sec = usec/1000000L;
    tv.tv_usec = usec%1000000L;
    return select(0, 0, 0, &dummy, &tv);
}

All these created usleep methods return zero when successful and non-zero for errors.