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  • Hacker News
  • I'm really curious... How did you manage to post this link before I did?
    by AlanZucconi
  • I have your feed in my RSS reader! This seemed like something HN would be interested in.
    by tobr
  • Ah yes, Xorshift, the RANDU [1] of the 21st century [2].

    There is no real use case for better non-CS generators, as explained by adrian_b back in 2021 [3].

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10020 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28886698

    by saithound
  • I don't know about all that, but I use Marsaglias for generating noise samples in MCUs like Pico. It's the fastest option there is for such devices.
    by mallets
  • > no real use case

    Yes there is. Not every system has the need or the resources to maintain a secure random sequence. You may also want a reproducible pseudo-random sequence in generative code that logs the seeds. Because of the misguided attitude that nobody needs these features, everyone who does need them has to roll their own now.

    by kevin_thibedeau
  • I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, exactly, but a use case for better non-CS generators has always been stochastic simulation, especially simulation/sampling approaches that are bound by the number and quality of uniform variates per second.

    As someone who has spent considerable time working in these areas, I still appreciate advances.

    by moregrist
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear-feedback_shift_register
    by YZF
  • I’ve replaced Lua’s random by this. I’ve posted about it here https://nullonerror.org/2025/08/02/replacing-lua-s-math-rand...
    by mococa
  • Lua 5.4 and 5.5 use xoshiro256**: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html#pdf-math.random
    by dchest
  • A number of years ago I implemented xoshiro256** for the GFortran compiler. Previously it used Marsaglia's KISS generator, which wasn't bad but perhaps no longer state of the art on the TESTU1 etc. tests. Additionally, xoshiro256** can be used in parallel by multiple threads; that took a bit of clever hacking to work around the limitations of the Fortran intrinsics API.
    by jabl
  • Xorshift-36 for the PDP-10, with help from Sebastiano Vigna.

    https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/xoroshiro-36

    by larsbrinkhoff
  • This is xoroshiro not xorshift. It's right there in the URL.
    by avadodin