Best way to break out of loop

I don't see what's wrong with just looping some maximum number of times and then stopping. It limits the actual amount of computation to a fixed amount. This will correspond to a different amount of time on different systems, but does it matter?

If you need to abandon processing until some event occurs, I do not see how you can avoid a call to WaitForSingleObject() or similar. It entails overhead, but what other choice do you have?

Thanks for the comments!

@iMalc "The fact that your real code will actually be doing something useful will mean that overall it wont be spending quite as much time sleeping."

Yes i didnt realize that, my bad.

@BMJ

Code:

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void ShakeIt()
{
    RECT rcWndSz;
    int iX = 0;
    int iY = 0;
    int iScreenX = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSCREEN);
    int iScreenY = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYSCREEN);
   
    DWORD oldtick = GetTickCount();
    while (1)
    {
        if (GetWindowRect(hWnd, &rcWndSz))
        {
            iX = rcWndSz.left + ((rand() % 5) * ((rand() % 100) > 50 ? 1 : -1));
            iY = rcWndSz.top  + ((rand() % 5) * ((rand() % 100) > 50 ? 1 : -1));

            iX = iX > iScreenX ? iScreenX : iX;
            iY = iY > iScreenY ? iScreenY : iY;
            iX = iX < 0 ? 0 : iX;
            iY = iY < 0 ? 0 : iY;

            SetWindowPos(hWnd, NULL, iX, iY, 0, 0, SWP_NOSIZE);
            Sleep(20);
        }
       
        if ((GetTickCount() - oldtick)> 3000) break;
    }
}

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