Re: [Haskell-cafe] Annoyed at System.Random

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Ertugrul Söylemez wrote:

Thomas DuBuisson wrote:

...

I've grown annoyed at System.Random enough (specifically, StdGen). How much, if any, pushback would there be if I put together a FFI binding to a C AES-CTR based RNG.  There are many advantages:

[...]

I'd be tempted to pull in the 'entropy' package for seeding, but will make that a separate proposal.

Why reinvent the wheel?

   http://hackage.haskell.org/package/cprng-aes

Has both a System.Random and a Crypto-API interface.  As such it is already connected to the 'entropy' package.

Vincent has done great work for Haskell+Crypto so I think he knows I mean nothing personal when I say cprng-aes has the right idea done the wrong way. Why a new effort vs Vincent's package? 1. cprng-aes is painfully slow. 2. It doesn't use NI instructions (or any C implementation, currently). 3. It isn't backtracking resistent. I plan to follow the SP and test against the KATs. 4. Lots of people still use "random" by default, so it would be good to have StdGen be something reasonable, where "reasonable" is from as many perspectives as we can manage. This isn't to say that we could use much of the structure and higher-level code that Vincent has already done. Cheers, Thomas

Greets, Ertugrul

-- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://ertes.de/

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