A Random Strawman

[Carter Schonwald]

I actually think a bit more exploratory work and building up some testing
and performance infrastructure in place are needed before doing any major
version bump of randoms algorithm.

  Additonally theres a good chance we'll be having a gsoc student this
summer who can help with this.

Additionally, I will likely be able to put some work engineering time into
exploring the algorithm choice.

Point being, I want the next major version bump of random to raise the bar
on engineering for prng libraries.  So we have a bit of work to do first
before we make a choice that forces  upgrades on the universe.  And we
arent there yet

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015, 2:00 PM Dominic Steinitz <dominic at steinitz.org> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> Having skimmed the literature, run some tests and benchmarks:
>
>
>    - The current System.Random is broken:
>    https://github.com/haskell/random/issues/25#issuecomment-87423142.
>    Furthermore, this is recorded in at least two published papers:
>    http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2660195 and
>    http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/183348/local_183348.pdf
>    .
>    - The tf-random package does not have this breakage and is based on
>    good theoretical foundations.
>    - In my tests tf-random performs better than System.Random.
>
>
> As a result of which, I am very much inclined to suggest we replace the
> code in System.Random with tf-random. Before doing any more work on this,
> I’d like to understand what the next steps should be.
>
>
>    - How much review should be carried out? I have no reason to doubt the
>    implementors have done a great job but should someone (who?) review the
>    code more formally. If so what would the process / tools be?
>    - Tests in packages / applications may now fail as the (pseudo) random
>    numbers will be different with this change. What should we do here? Alert
>    folks (who and how?) that the may have to rebase their tests? Tell folks
>    that 1.1 is deprecated and they should move to 2.0 (I think it’s right to
>    indicate this is a completely new version)?
>    - Are there any other steps?
>
>
> FYI: I did look at Guy Steele et al. but I don’t believe there is
> currently a Haskell implementation of it, probably ruling it out as
> possible solution in the medium term.
>
> Dominic Steinitz
> dominic at steinitz.org
> http://idontgetoutmuch.wordpress.com
>
>
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