Programmatically getting system boot up time in c++ (windows)

Question

So quite simply, the question is how to get the system boot up time in windows with c/c++. Searching for this hasn't got me any answer, I have only found a really hacky approach which is reading a file timestamp ( needless to say, I abandoned reading that halfway ). Another approach that I found was actually reading windows diagnostics logged events? Supposedly that has last boot up time. Does anyone know how to do this (with hopefully not too many ugly hacks)?

Accepted Answer

`GetTickCount64` "retrieves the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since the system was started."

Once you know how long the system has been running, it is simply a matter of subtracting this duration from the current time to determine when it was booted. For example, using the C++11 chrono library (supported by Visual C++ 2012):

```
auto uptime = std::chrono::milliseconds(GetTickCount64());
auto boot_time = std::chrono::system_clock::now() - uptime;
```

The subtraction in the second line is possible thanks to operator+, operator-

Programmatically getting system boot up time in c++ (windows)

Solution

Problem