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>This is because they are designed to be portable to a wide variety of compilers and target devices which might have limits that weren't envisioned at the time of writing the standard.

That's not really the case here, is it? If anything the bug is in the standard.

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> std::random_device may be implemented in terms of an implementation-defined pseudo-random number engine if a non-deterministic source (e.g. a hardware device) is not available to the implementation.

Windows has a non-deterministic source (IE: The function CryptGenRandom). Therefore, this is a bug in MingW's implementation. CryptGenRandom is hard to use, but that's no excuse for MingW's developers to be lazy.

Pointing at a "mistake" in the spec when the intent of the spec is extremely clear is laziness. Pure and simple.

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