cauldron

The holy grail of random float generation is a function that takes two bounds and can generate ALL representable floating point numbers within the given bounds with the proper distribution, here uniform (and does so efficiently). I've written such an implementation with explanations [0], but it doesn't handle subnormals correctly. I've yet to find the time to revisit the problem. [0] https://github.com/camel-cdr/cauldron/blob/main/cauldron/ran...

I've previously written an algorithm that generates random floats in any [a,b], which can generate all possible floating point values, including subnormals, with the proper probability, and does so quickly for any choice of a and b. [0] [0] https://github.com/camel-cdr/cauldron/blob/main/cauldron/ran...

Yeah, the amount of times I've seen `rand() % range` and other non-uniform distributions is staggering. I've actually held a presentation on the topic, with a chapter on generating uniform floats [1] There I also describe a simplified algorithm for generating uniform floats where every representable floating point value can occur with the appropriate probability. I'm still not 100% sure that my implementation is correct, but I did all I could think of to test it [2] [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=VHJUlRiRDCY&t=2774s [2] https://github.com/camel-cdr/cauldron/blob/main/cauldron/ran...

I found that instead of adding format specifiers, one can create a construct that uses occurrences of '\0' in strings to insert values: FMT_BEGIN("a + b = \0 + \0 = \0\n") { FMT(float, (a)); FMT(float, (b)); FMT(float, (a + b)); } FMT_END; FMT_BEGIN("x = \0 = 0x\0 = 0b\0\na = \0\nb = \0\n") { FMT(uint, (x)); FMT(uint_base, ((unsigned)x, 16, "0123456789abcdef")); FMT(uint_base, ((unsigned)x, 2, "01")); FMT(Vec3, (a)); FMT(Vec3, (b)); } FMT_END; The major advantage here is that you don't need to parse a dsl, and you can still have formatting options. A final api would probably use automatic compound literal struct arguments to implement default arguments with names parameters. Type detection should also be possible, although you would need to register all print functions in a global macro. This is just a p