Portable nonbusy hold?

Can it be done?

Background:

As we all know, there are a gajillion ways of inserting delay into a program, from superfluous for loops that do nothing, to the more sophisticated time(NULL)-split>howLong method, and then there are nonportables such as windows.h's Sleep(), and the myriad of sleep()'s, delay()'s and _delay()'s found in compilers.

My question:

Is there any way to make a portable, nonbusy hold?

My current code does this:

Code:

void holdOnThere(int howLongToWait) { 

time_t split = time(NULL); 

while (time(NULL) - split < howLongToWait) { } 

return; 

}

Which is a portable(mostly) but busy wait. I think windows.h's Sleep() is nonbusy, but it isn't portable.

Is there any way to get both in one construct, and if so, how?

AFAIK its not possible to do this in a portable way. You will always need to use the features of your chosen operating system to do this.

But the only dumb question is the one not asked...

I was considering maybe using a wrapper function and conditional compilation directives to simulate portability, but I'd still need the appropriate calls for each OS.