End of support notice for sfmt-erlang and tinymt-erlang

Your Libraries & OS Mentoring Libraries
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This is the public announcement of maintenance termination of sfmt-erlang and tinymt-erlang software.

I, Kenji Rikitake, will no longer maintain sfmt-erlang and tinymt-erlang pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) for Erlang.

PRNG algorithms of SFMT and TinyMT had their advantage in 2010 when I first started implementing them to Erlang/OTP as alternative modules of the random module (deprecated since OTP 18). After the emergence of xorshift, xoroshiro, and xoshiro algorithms by Sebastiano Vigna, however, the advantage of SFMT and TinyMT has been mostly eradicated. Please refer to the following paper preprint by Sebastiano Vigna for the further explanation of the known issues of SFMT and TinyMT:

Sebastiano Vigna, “It is high time we let go of the Mersenne Twister”, arXiv, 2019, eprint: 1910.06437, [1910.06437] It is high time we let go of the Mersenne Twister

Fortunately, the rand module, current PRNG of Erlang/OTP, has already employed variations of xorshift and xoroshiro algorithms called exsss and exro928ss, with the help of Sebastiano Vigna and the effort of Raimo Niskanen and other people in the OTP Team. So the general alternative solution is to use the rand module functions.

sfmt-erlang has the NIFs to generate many random numbers at once. For writing PRNG NIFs, the following repository will be helpful:

However, it would help if you remembered that Erlang/OTP rand module uses the 58-bit specialized version of Vigna’s PRNG algorithms, so the C and C++ implementations which are shown above are not a direct replacement of the rand module functions.

The following related repositories are in archive mode.

Kenji Rikitake

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