On Mon, Aug 16 2004, MenTaLguY wrote: Note that GLIB has already a very good and portable implementation of such thing, which is one of the best (in the sense of uniformity of randomness and speed) algorithms used today:
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/glib/glib-Random-Numbers.html
Very interesting. I guess the only question is whether its implementation is guaranteed not to change at this point -- if we have no such guarantee, then we would need to copy it to Inkscape rather than using it directly from glib.
I'm sure the GTK/GLIB is commited to such stability, because as you can read from the documentation, the random number implementation was not that good from start, so they adopted the Mersenne Twister and provided a compatibility flag for the older one.
From my experience, they have been very professional regarding upward
and backward compatibility.
If it had changed in the past, that might be bad too, actually, if versions of Inkscape built with older glibs rendered randomized stars differently. So we'd also need to copy in that case.
Sure, but in any case, Inkscape can always include the proper code itself if the implementation changes in the future (but I think that's improbable).
Regards, Marcelo