It's possible to delay the execution of a thread (sleep) using either of two methods. One is sleep_for(), which delays execution by at least the specified duration, but possibly longer:

#include <iostream> 
#include <chrono> 
#include <thread> 
        using namespace std::chrono_literals;

        typedef std::chrono::time_point<std::chrono::high_resolution_clock> timepoint; 
int main() { 
         std::cout << "Starting sleep.n"; 
 
         timepoint start = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now(); 
 
         std::this_thread::sleep_for(2s); 
 
         timepoint end = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now(); 
         std::chrono::duration<double, std::milli> elapsed = end - 
         start; 
         std::cout << "Slept for: " << elapsed.count() << " msn"; 
} 

This preceding code shows how to sleep for roughly 2 seconds, measuring the exact duration using a counter with the highest precision possible on the current OS.

Note that we are able to specify the number of seconds directly, with the seconds post-fix. This is a C++14 feature that got added to the <chrono> header. For the C++11 version, one has to create an instance of std::chrono::seconds and pass it to the sleep_for() function.

The other method is sleep_until(), which takes a single parameter of type std::chrono::time_point<Clock, Duration>. Using this function, one can set a thread to sleep until the specified time point has been reached. Due to the operating system's scheduling priorities, this wake-up time might not be the exact time as specified.