Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!nntp.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Tim Rentsch Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: srand(0) Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:26:18 -0800 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 22 Message-ID: <86cy3knhhh.fsf@linuxsc.com> References: <10ib0ka$3cgil$1@dont-email.me> <10ibava$2sora$1@dont-email.me> <10ibcub$25ihi$2@dont-email.me> <10ibu81$2sora$2@dont-email.me> <10ibvrm$25ihh$2@dont-email.me> <20251222204538.00003fc2@yahoo.com> <10iekvr$pa8n$1@paganini.bofh.team> <20251224000824.00005ce7@yahoo.com> <10iga40$11ds6$1@paganini.bofh.team> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Injection-Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:26:25 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="f646824e109d26d154da12d2f3c25277"; logging-data="1779847"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18U8wjMTzu8hiYuaM1zEvgP3iHCA34LBtg=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:7OpOFvVy5pIRFTPHF++dwc3UDSc= sha1:Ec++xSig8WSJCPwbYRCN4DqlIz4= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:396302 antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) writes: > Michael S wrote: [...] >> Anyway, even if I am skeptical about her criticism of popular PRNGs, >> intuitively I agree with the constructive part of the article - >> medium-quality PRNG that feeds medium quality hash function can >> potentially produce very good fast PRNG with rather small internal >> state. > > She seem to care very much about having minimal possible state. > That is may be nice on embeded systems, but in general I would > happily accept slighty bigger state (say 256 bits). But if > we can get good properties with very small state, then why not? > [...] That depends on whether one thinks the tests done to measure quality are sufficient to determine all the axes of "good properties". I'm not inclined to think that they do. The set of tests done in the TestU01 suite are quite good IMO, but I don't think they measure all the properties of interest. I prefer to err on the side of caution.