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Subject: Re: [boost] Removing auto_ptr/etc. from Boost
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-19 20:47:31


On 19 Mar 2015 at 19:33, Stephan T. Lavavej wrote:

> [STL]
> > (mt19937 is awesome, but at 5 KB I'd be slightly nervous about making it thread_local.)
>
> [Steven Watanabe]
> > boost::mt19937 is only 2.5 KB.
>
> Thanks - I see where the factor of 2 is coming from, although it'll need a bit more thought to untangle. I've filed a bug in our internal database.

Anyone considering using mt19937 should be aware it was painfully
slow on ARM where it used the generic C implementation. I use the
past tense because I don't know the current state of things having
excised all uses of Mersenne from my code as a result - nevertheless,
Mersenne is only awesome on Intel, and a similar dog slow speed to a
crypto random source on some other CPUs.

Personally speaking if I need portable, fast, not awful randomness, I
like http://burtleburtle.net/bob/rand/smallprng.html. It's much
faster to initialise than mersenne too, runs very well on all CPUs
without special opcodes, but the output isn't quite as random. As a
rand() replacement it ought to be plenty fine, a 2^126 average period
is plenty.

Niall

-- 
ned Productions Limited Consulting
http://www.nedproductions.biz/ 
http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/



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