[Haskell-cafe] Mersenne-random and standard random API

[Ertugrul Söylemez]

Yves Parès <yves.pares at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been in the past told that mersenne-random was much better than
> the standard random package.

This is relative.  The Mersenne Twister algorithm has a large memory
footprint, but in relation to the size of the average Haskell program,
this is probably not much of an issue.


> So is it possible to use the fast and efficient mersenne generator
> with the convenient and general random API?

No, because mersenne-random provides an impure generator with a global
state, as is also pointed out by the Haddock documentation.  As an
alternative consider the mersenne-random-pure64 and the cprng-aes
packages.  Both provide the interface you want.

Personally I prefer the cprng-aes package, because it is reasonably fast
and convenient for non-cryptographic applications, but also provides a
strong Crypto-API interface, if you need cryptographically strong random
numbers.


Greets,
Ertugrul

-- 
nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
http://ertes.de/
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