[Haskell-cafe] Annoyed at System.Random

[Ryan Newton]

Hi Thomas,

Personally, I would love to see that happen.  It seems like the best way to
make split acceptable.

Is Brian Gladman's C implementation still best in class?  In my tests even
without AESNI it could exceed the traditional System.Random in performance (
https://github.com/rrnewton/intel-aes/wiki), while providing much better
randomness and splitability.

Re: AESNI, my attempt at using the Intel provided asm for this introduced
build fragility.  What would be the more portable way to do it?  Rewrite it
using GCC intrinsics?

   http://tab.snarc.org/posts/technical/2012-04-12-aes-intrinsics.html

  -Ryan


On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 7:43 PM, Thomas DuBuisson <thomas.dubuisson at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Ryan,
> I've grown annoyed at System.Random enough (specifically, StdGen).
> How much, if any, pushback would there be if I put together a FFI
> binding to a C AES-CTR based RNG.  There are many advantages:
>
> 0) The API wouldn't have to change (though some parts should, and some
> change is already planned)
> 1) It can be fast (maybe not MT fast, but really quite good)
> 2) It's secure and the splitting properties can be related to
> cryptographic problems.
> 3) It could use Intel NI instructions when available.
> 4) It's NIST standardized, so there exist known answer tests.
> 5) We could expose a method to fill an arbitrary buffer :: Storable a
> => Ptr a -> Int -> IO ()
> 6) The rest of the community doesn't have to do any of the work.
>
> I'd be tempted to pull in the 'entropy' package for seeding, but will
> make that a separate proposal.
>
> Cheers,
> Thomas
>
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