Haskell High Performance Programming

Random number generators

The libraries in this subsection are as follows:

• MonadRandom: Simple monadic interface for supplying random numbers. Uses System.Random. It's rather slow and not very secure.
• mwc-random: Very fast pseudo-random number generation. Probably not cryptographically secure.
• random-fu: Good support for sampling a wide range of different distributions. Good quality but not terribly slow either.
• mersenne-random: Pseudo-random numbers using a Mersenne Twister. Probably fastest RNG for Haskell when SIMD is supported.

Random numbers have multiple applications, from simulations to cryptography. Random number generators come with different trade-offs that suit different applications. Others are very fast and not really that random, while ...