Timer & Thread

Well...which operating system you are using? It looks like you are trying to achieve this under Windows.

First of all Windows is far away from being real-time. So, if you definitely need absolute real-time you should consider using such an operating system like QNX.

Nevertheless there are much better solutions under Windows than using the WM_TIMER messages like waitable timers or multimedia timers...

The following is a sample how to use waitable timers. They will delay execution by 10 seconds in the following...

#include <iostream>
#include <windows.h>
#include <conio.h>

int main()
{
HANDLE hTimer = NULL;
LARGE_INTEGER liTime;

liTime.QuadPart=-100000000;

// Create a waitable timer.
hTimer = ::CreateWaitableTimer(NULL, TRUE, "WaitableTimer");
if(!hTimer)
{
std::cout << "Could not create waitable timer (Error "
<< ::GetLastError() << ")" << std::endl;
::Sleep(5000);
return -1;
}

std::cout << "Wait for 10 seconds..." << std::endl;

// Set timer
if(!::SetWaitableTimer(hTimer, &liTime, 0, NULL, NULL, 0))
{
std::cout << "Could not set waitable timer (Error "
<< ::GetLastError() << std::endl;
::Sleep(5000);
return -1;
}

// Wait for timer
if(::WaitForSingleObject(hTimer, INFINITE) != WAIT_OBJECT_0)
std::cout << "Could not wait for timer object (Error "
<< ::GetLastError() << std::endl;
else
std::cout << "Time elapsed" << std::endl;

// Wait for keystroke
_getch();

return 0;
}

For additional information you might take a look at http://www.codeproject.com/system/timers_intro.asp. It is a very comprehensive timer tutorial.