This is implemented as a wrapper around another RNG. It is designed
to allow the actual implementation to be changed without changing
the external API (e.g. it currently uses a 64-bit generator on 64-
bit platforms, and a 32-bit one on 32-bit platforms; but one could
imagine that the IsaacRng may be deprecated later, and having this
ability to switch algorithms without having to update the points of
use is convenient.)
This is the recommended general use RNG.
The former reads from e.g. /dev/urandom, the latter just wraps any
std::rt::io::Reader into an interface that implements Rng.
This also adds Rng.fill_bytes for efficient implementations of the above
(reading 8 bytes at a time is inefficient when you can read 1000), and
removes the dependence on src/rt (i.e. rand_gen_seed) although this last
one requires implementing hand-seeding of the XorShiftRng used in the
scheduler on Linux/unixes, since OSRng relies on a scheduler existing to
be able to read from /dev/urandom.
This is 2x faster on 64-bit computers at generating anything larger
than 32-bits.
It has been verified against the canonical C implementation from the
website of the creator of ISAAC64.
Also, move `Rng.next` to `Rng.next_u32` and add `Rng.next_u64` to
take full advantage of the wider word width; otherwise Isaac64 will
always be squeezed down into a u32 wasting half the entropy and
offering no advantage over the 32-bit variant.
This PR solves one of the pain points with c-style enums. Simplifies writing a fn to convert from an int/uint to an enum. It does this through a `#[deriving(FromPrimitive)]` syntax extension.
Before this is committed though, we need to discuss if `ToPrimitive`/`FromPrimitive` has the right design (cc #4819). I've changed all the `.to_int()` and `from_int()` style functions to return `Option<int>` so we can handle partial functions. For this PR though only enums and `extra::num::bigint::*` take advantage of returning None for unrepresentable values. In the long run it'd be better if `i64.to_i8()` returned `None` if the value was too large, but I'll save this for a future PR.
Closes#3868.
It is simply defined as `f64` across every platform right now.
A use case hasn't been presented for a `float` type defined as the
highest precision floating point type implemented in hardware on the
platform. Performance-wise, using the smallest precision correct for the
use case greatly saves on cache space and allows for fitting more
numbers into SSE/AVX registers.
If there was a use case, this could be implemented as simply a type
alias or a struct thanks to `#[cfg(...)]`.
Closes#6592
The mailing list thread, for reference:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-July/004632.html
Also, documentation & general clean-up:
- remove `gen_char_from`: better served by `sample` or `choose`.
- `gen_bytes` generalised to `gen_vec`.
- `gen_int_range`/`gen_uint_range` merged into `gen_integer_range` and
made to be properly uniformly distributed. Fixes#8644.
Minor adjustments to other functions.
