On Thursday, 20 March 2014 at 01:07:54 UTC, bearophile wrote:
In Bugzilla probably there are many bug reports/enhancement requests about std.random, so I suggest you to read them. Some of them can be useful, while other are probably already addressed in the current (or planned) std.random2.
Yes, indeed. Quite a few of them _are_ addressed, I think, but now that I've got the essentials of the design laid out, I should be systematic and go through them.
Another random one that was just commented by Infiltrator: https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5901
Well, you already have the NormalDistribution in std.random2.distribution ;-) I clearly can also implement function-only Box-Muller variant that spends 2 random variates to generate a single normally-distributed value, as this doesn't have the problem of needing to store state or allocate memory, so I will add that at some stage.
I'm reluctant to add a specific fastRandom because I think here the better option is a really nice range-based algorithm that can generate high quality variates at speed (e.g. the Ziggurat algorithm is a good candidate here). There's a quite good review of different algorithms here:
http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~phwl/mt/public/archives/papers/grng_acmcs07.pdf But of course I'm open to arguments here :-)
