Re: [avr-libc-dev] rand(3) in avr-libc

[Joerg Wunsch]

As E. Weddington wrote:

> Besides crypto, is there any other use for the heavier 
> PRNG? If there isn't, then it would probably be more of a hassle than 
> it's worth. I mean, unless you (Joerg) *really* wanna do it... :-)

Porting the BSD random(3) module isn't that much work.  I did it
yesterday, maybe it took me 15 minutes or so, basically the `port'
consists of adding a few Ls to the long integer constants. ;-)
However, that's when i noticed the resulting code gets into the
region of ~ 2 KB (even without the called library routines like
32-bit division/multiplication), and eventually threw away the
result again... :)

I'm only hesitant to bloat avr-libc for no reason, and i don't
want to bloat the API with stuff nobody's going to use, ever.  So
that was my basic question: i think we can agree that having a
function named random() that returns a long int (as opposed to
rand() returning an int) is a good idea.  So the only question is
which of the available functions to stuff behind random(), and if
we want to provide both, how to name the second one.

-- 
J"org Wunsch                                           Unix support engineer
address@hidden        http://www.interface-systems.de/~j/