Fifteen Ways to Leave Your Random Module

Legacy "random" module is deprecated in Erlang/OTP Release 19, and will be removed from the Release 20. Erlang developers are supposed to use "rand" module as the primary Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNGs), available from Release 18. Kenji describes the details in the brief history of Erlang/OTP PRNGs and how to migrate to the newer algorithms including those of "rand" module, with showing their advantages and limitations.

Talk objectives:

* Show the general information of when and how to choose a specific PRNG algorithm

* Show the pitfalls on using PRNGs and how to avoid them on Erlang

* Show the advantages and limitations of newer algorithms in "rand" module

* Show the practical use cases of PRNGs, focusing on concurrency and parallelism

Target audience:

Programmers interested in Erlang library internals, and the users intending to apply Erlang for simulation and modelling.

Slides
Video

About Kenji

Kenji Rikitake has been writing Erlang code since 2008. His recent open source work includes XORshift+/* code contribution to Erlang/OTP rand module, Erlang random number libraries of SFMT and TinyMT algorithms, and a hardware random number generator based on Arduino UNO R3. Kenji writes code since 1974. He has become an independent professional engineer since 2014, after working for various computer industry and academic/research organizations since 1990, including Digital Equipment Corporation, Kyoto University and Basho Technologies.

GitHub: jj1bdx

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