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Comment by anewhnaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I would take that with a pinch of salt. The PCG and Xoshiro guys seem to have some kind of feud so some of the criticisms might not be as big a problem as they are made out to be in practice. Here's a partial rebuttal:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8gx2d3/new_lin...

For a bit of "social proof" xoshiro256++ is the default PRNG is Julia.

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Sebastiano Vigna seems to have a beef. For all I've seen M.E. O'Neill has handled the situation really well. Taking Vignas claims and critique seriously.

https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/on-vignas-pcg-critique.html

Here's Vigna's random function if anyone's curious.

    uint64_t vigna_r(uint64_t state[static 1]) {
      uint64_t z = (state[0] += 0x9e3779b97f4a7c15);
      z = (z ^ (z >> 30)) * 0xbf58476d1ce4e5b9;
      z = (z ^ (z >> 27)) * 0x94d049bb133111eb;
      return z ^ (z >> 31);
    }

It passes bigcrush and practrand plus -ftree-vectorize makes it faster than xorshift.

My practical takeaway from these discussions is that for most people, in most situations, any of these modern choices are good enough for purpose - the differences (in whichever direction they lay) come in only when you're pushing the PRNG to its extremes, while operating with a specific set of constraints.

Yes the usual war between xoroshiro and pcg haters/lovers.

You could also take the opposite takeaway: don't use any of those, stay on the Mersenne-Twister (the modern variants are very reasonable).

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