On Monday, September 12, 2016 at 7:32:48 AM UTC-4, Neal Becker wrote: > > PnSeq.jl calls rand() to get a Int64, caching the result and then > providing > N bits at a time to fill an Array. It's supposed to be a fast way to get > an > Array of small-width random integers. >
rand(T, n) already does this for small integer types T. (In fact, it generates 128 random bits at a time.) See base/random.jl <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/d0e7684dd0ce867e1add2b88bb91f1c4574100e0/base/random.jl#L507-L515> for how it does it. In a quick test, rand(UInt16, 10^6) was more than 6x faster than pnseq(16)(10^6, UInt16). (In a performance-critical situation where you are calling this lots of times to generate random arrays, I would pre-allocate the array A and call rand!(A) instead to fill it with random numbers in-place.)
