On Thursday, 14 June 2012 at 23:32:41 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
I'm not talking about passing them as refs. I'm talking about
making them
reference types. It arguably makes no sense for random number
generators to be
passed around by value. It makes it ludicrously easy to get the
same value
multiple times simply because you passed it around.
I didn't have time to look at the specific issue with
RandomSample yet, but I can confirm that the implications of the
current RNG-as-a-value design were surprising for me as well when
I first used std.random – I see the point in avoiding heap
allocations whenever possible, though.
David
