[swift-users] Make getting a random number more intuitive

Jens Alfke jens at mooseyard.com
Thu Jan 21 14:50:39 CST 2016


> On Jan 21, 2016, at 12:07 PM, Lukas Stabe via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> In addition to not being very obvious, arc4random is also not supported on platforms other than OSX.

It’s also available in OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

> Be aware that the generators are not able to produce cryptographically secure random, and I’m pretty new to this field. I basically just ported some generators from http://xorshift.di.unimi.it/ <http://xorshift.di.unimi.it/> to Swift.

In general it’s better to provide a cryptographically-safe RNG, so people can’t accidentally use an insecure one in a context that needs security. Since every OS provides one of these, I think it’d be best for Swift to provide a single RNG API whose implementation calls the platform’s RNG.

—Jens
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