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Lobsters0 Hot0 comments8 min read
Why I forked rand
The author explains why they forked Rust's popular rand crate to create urandom, a randomness library designed around discoverability and simplicity. Key motivations include: consolidating the API onto a single Random struct (eliminating the need to hunt across multiple traits), sealing the Rng trait to allow generators and algorithms to specialize for each other, achieving ~31% higher throughput for Xoshiro f64 generation via specialized next_f32/next_f64 methods, and implementing a single unbiased uniform integer sampling path using Lemire's multiply-and-reject algorithm. The crate also offers stronger reproducibility guarantees than rand, promising stable raw output across architectures and SemVer-compatible releases. The trade-off is a smaller ecosystem and no support for plugging in arbitrary generators.
Source: https://casualhacks.net/blog/2026-07-27-why-i-forked-rand.html. 8sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
