At least on windows to get the ticks we depend either on GetTickCount, that will overflow and you can't avoid that, or sticky to the high resolution timer.
Even using HR timer on 32 bits systems will overflow if you don't want to use QWords(if you use QWords you can use GetTickCount64).
btw I think that GetTickCount and GetTickCount64 are dependent on the system HR timer, so we still use it indirectly(or they use the PIC timer counter?, i don't remember >.<).