[boost] boost::random, header-only, boost::uuids::detail::seed_rng, and UWP development

Subject: [boost] boost::random, header-only, boost::uuids::detail::seed_rng, and UWP development
From: James E. King, III (jking_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-09-12 12:40:35

Hi folks,

It looks like the only reason boostorg/random is not a header-only library
is due to random_device (it is the only src/ file:
https://github.com/boostorg/random/tree/develop/src). The older WinCrypt
calls are not available in some Windows platforms going forward, so this is
going to become a problem pretty quickly for the community.

In the boostorg/uuid library there is a seed_rng class which is doing
similar things (however providing more entropy) and the library is
header-only.  In addition there are two filed defects - one in Trac and one
in github issues, about uuid being incompatible with UWP applications
(that's Windows universal apps).  In uuid, I started adding support for
BCrypt which is a Windows API supported on later versions of Windows, and
once I changed my build flags to target Windows 10 and WINAPI_FAMILY_APP, I
started getting build failures in random_device.

On further inspection it looks like the random library doesn't have support
for BCrypt yet, and even worse as a source library one would need to build
two variants - one for WinCrypt and one for BCrypt to support older and
newer windows platforms.  There are also some implications on MinGW, as the
older original MinGW has support for WinCrypt and MinGW-64 supports both.

I'm going to propose that the implementation from
boost::uuids::detail::seed_rng be moved into boost::random as the new
random_device implementation.  At the same time, boost::random will become
header-only, and thus support setting _WIN32_WINNT at build time of
consuming applications properly, and therefore support new Windows
platforms properly.

At the same time I would like to change seed_rng such that it no longer
silently ignores some return values, and does not disable any compiler
warnings (deprecations, currently).

Thoughts?

Thanks,

- Jim