[Haskell-cafe] Annoyed at System.Random

[Ryan Newton]

>
> My end goal is to have the user use transparently the fastest
> implementation available to their architecture/cpu providing they use the
> high level module. I've uploaded the cpu package which allows me to detect
> at runtime the aes instruction (and the architecture), but i've been
> distracted in implementing fast galois field arithmetics for GCM and XTS
> mode (with AES).
>

Yes!  A worthy goal!

I think the proposal here is that we do the build/integration work to get
something good which is portable enough and install-reliable enough to
replace 'random'.  Then people who don't care will be using a good
implementation by default.

That was my goal when I had my own small shot at this, but what I came up
with was *very* build-fragile.  (Depended on assembler being available, or
on prebuilt binaries being included for that package.)  You can see the
Setup.hs customization I attempted to do in intel-aes to compensate, but
it's not enough.

Can we write a cabal-compatible, really robust installer that will test the
users system and always fall back rather than failing?

  -Ryan

P.S. How are you doing the CPUID test for NI instructions?  I used the
*intel provided* test for this (in intel-aes) but I still had reports of
incorrect identification on certain AMD CPUs...
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