Lua - Current time in milliseconds

In standard C lua, no. You will have to settle for seconds, unless you are willing to modify the lua interpreter yourself to have os.time use the resolution you want. That may be unacceptable, however, if you are writing code for other people to run on their own and not something like a web application where you have full control of the environment.

Edit: another option is to write your own small DLL in C that extends lua with a new function that would give you the values you want, and require that dll be distributed with your code to whomever is going to be using it.

I use LuaSocket to get more precision.

require "socket"
print("Milliseconds: " .. socket.gettime()*1000)

This adds a dependency of course, but works fine for personal use (in benchmarking scripts for example).

If you want to benchmark, you can use os.clock as shown by the doc:

local x = os.clock()
local s = 0
for i=1,100000 do s = s + i end
print(string.format("elapsed time: %.2f\n", os.clock() - x))

Get current time in milliseconds.

os.time()

os.time()
return sec // only

posix.clock_gettime(clk)

https://luaposix.github.io/luaposix/modules/posix.time.html#clock_gettime

require'posix'.clock_gettime(0)
return sec, nsec

linux/time.h // man clock_gettime

/*
 * The IDs of the various system clocks (for POSIX.1b interval timers):
 */
#define CLOCK_REALTIME                  0
#define CLOCK_MONOTONIC                 1
#define CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID        2
#define CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID         3
#define CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW             4
#define CLOCK_REALTIME_COARSE           5
#define CLOCK_MONOTONIC_COARSE          6

socket.gettime()

http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/socket.html#gettime

require'socket'.gettime()
return sec.xxx

as waqas says

---

compare & test

get_millisecond.lua

local posix=require'posix'
local socket=require'socket'

for i=1,3 do
    print( os.time() )
    print( posix.clock_gettime(0) )
    print( socket.gettime() )
    print''
    posix.nanosleep(0, 1) -- sec, nsec
end

output

lua get_millisecond.lua
1490186718
1490186718      268570540
1490186718.2686

1490186718
1490186718      268662191
1490186718.2687

1490186718
1490186718      268782765
1490186718.2688