DAdanny00·Oct 26, 2025Submission
Fast backtracking-resistant random generator
2 points · Open discussiongoogle
randen
C++2018–2025
google / randen · Archived
randen
Fast backtracking-resistant random generator: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02227
4Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
338GitHub stars
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What it is
Fast backtracking-resistant random generator: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02227
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-06-11 10:17:34 UTC to 2025-10-26 13:34:16 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesextremely expensive
No. CSPRNGs can be pretty competitive these days: https://github.com/google/randen
Yes, in some cases that’s still (a bit) too slow or too much code but best to benchmark first.
In Monte Carlo Crash Course: Quasi-Monte CarloIt is not directly in the article, but in a link to a tweet by djb, the creator of ChaCha8. He believes that the cpb listed in the Randen comparison is off:
https://twitter.com/hashbreaker/status/1023965175219728386
He mentions that perhaps the implementation of ChaCha8 for the benchmark is done by hand and unoptimized. And it is true from what I saw that a lot of benchmarks with ChaCha8 are implemented with none of the tweaks that make it fast.
In this instance, it looks like the Randen author didn’t reimplement it from scratch, but they used an SSE implementation, not an AVX2 one, which would have been faster: https://github.com/google/randen/blob/1365a91bafc04ba491ce79...
In Show HN: Shishua – Fast pseudo-random generatorIf you need something fast and with stronger security guarantees, Google Randen remains a solid choice. https://github.com/google/randen
In Show HN: Shishua – Fast pseudo-random generatorFor a fast and secure RNG, take a look at Google Randen instead: https://github.com/google/randen
In PCG: a family of better random number generators