Xavier Leroy <xavier.le...@inria.fr> writes:
> On 01/01/2012 01:52 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 06:06:26PM +0100, Xavier Leroy wrote:
>>> Indeed. The optional "seed" parameter to Hashtbl.create does exactly
>>> this in the new implementation of Hashtbl (the one based on Murmur3).
>>
>> It may be worth noting that Perl solved this problem (back in 2003) by
>> unconditionally using a seed which is a global set to a random number
>> during interpreter initialization.
>
> That's how my initial reimplementation of Hashtbl worked, using the
> Random module to produce seeds, but I was told (correctly) that in
> security-sensitive applications it's better to leave the generation of
> random numbers under control of the programmer. For some applications
> Random.self_init might be good enough and for others stronger
> randomness is needed.
>
> Of course, you can trivially emulate Perl's behavior using the new
> Hashtbl implementation + the Random module.
>
> - Xavier Leroy
It is also crucial if you are doing performance tests or debugging. You
want the same behaviour on every run for that.
MfG
Goswin
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