pcg_rand

To use this library add the following to your Cargo.toml

pcg_rand = "0.13.0"

PCG stands for Permuted Congruential generators. They are a simple family of random number generators which use the much denounced Linear Congruential Generator as a base. To overcome the well known limitations of the LCG Generator the PCG family utilizes permutation functions to permute the output. More information about PCG can be found here.

Current Status

This library currently provides 32 and 64 bit generators. It provides the major "stream" types, including the unique stream which is determined by their current location in memory.

Future Work

• Implement seeking for the generators

Changes

• (6/8/2016): Added support for extended generators. This implementation is based on my understanding of how the extension is specified in the paper. I would love a code review on the implementation. I don't think that this particular implementation is the same as the implementation in the C++ version of PCG.
• (6/7/2016): Added back some of the macros which got removed in 0.5.0 This is in an effort to improve some performance. Hopefully associated constants can help us remove these again, but for now removing the PcgConsts trait gives some extra performance and reduces indirection. It also means that it is now easier to implement new streams and multipliers because you aren't bound to using the three things in PcgConsts.
• (7/31/2018): Remembered to update the README (including changelog). Migrated to using the rand: 0.5 crate which involves new methods. Most of the functions are now not based on macro's but instead are fully generic and utilize the num-traits wrapping traits as needed. Additionally the crate now has support for using the native u128 since that is stable in Rust now. This pushes the minimum Rust version to 1.26.
• (8/2/2018): Provided better defaults for the new_unseeded function so that it can be useful for testing. Improved the docs to suggest seeding and updated the documentation examples to use from_entropy instead of new_unseeded to promote good use of the generators.
• (10/15/2018): Added cargo features for u128 and experimental serde1 support. Also fixed an issue in 0.9.2 which caused it to be nightly only (oops). Started migrating benchmarks to critereon.
• (12/4/2018): Upgraded to rand 0.6 and rand_core 0.3. Fixed an issue where tests wouldn't run if there was no u128 support. Serde support is still highly experimental.
• (12/12/2018): Bump to 0.10.1 to include the CI build badge on crates.io
• (10/24/2019): Bump to 0.11.0 to use rand 0.7 and rand_core 0.5
• (10/28/2019): Bump to 0.11.1. Added the ability to make generators output a a permutation of their entire internal state.
• (10/02/2020): Update to 0.13.0. Added the ability to extract the internal state of the generator. Moved the examples from bin to examples for better discovery. Changed the serialization derivation, it only makes sense to deserialize into a SetSeq type so it is the only one which supports deserialization. The serialization step writes out the internal state as an array and does not record any information about the type of generator.
• (10/12/2020): Added the DXsM output and made it the default (this is the specified intention of the C++ library author). Re-worked serialization to create a definition structure which contains all the information needed to verify that the PCG you are serializing into/out-of is compatible with the stored information. This can be disabled with the no_deserialize_verify feature.