tstarling added a comment.
We (Brad Jorsch and I) didn't want random numbers in Scribunto because it encourages an inefficient implementation of things like "spotlight" templates that show a random featured article from a list of such articles. We want to cache the output from Scribunto but then people will see the same random selection for months at a time, so users will inevitably try to defeat caching or incentivize purge requests. For this application I would suggest passing a random number in $setupOptions to LuaEngine::registerInterface(). Implement your own LCG <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator> which should be doable in 2 lines of code even though you only have floating point numbers. The multiplication needs to fit in the 53-bit mantissa of the floating point number without rounding, which is not a problem for say MINSTD m=2^31-1, a=48271, which gives a maximum base 2 logarithm of 47. Or just increment a counter and report every time the counter mod N is zero. Offset the counter at startup by a random number. If you actually wanted to unconditionally seed the global RNG, this would not be the right way to do it. Better to seed it in mw.executeModule() based on an additional parameter passed from PHP. os.clock() only looks attractive as a random number source because we've deliberately avoided providing better random number sources to Lua. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T360891 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: hoo, tstarling Cc: tstarling, Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE, Aklapper, Michael, Danny_Benjafield_WMDE, Isabelladantes1983, Themindcoder, Adamm71, S8321414, Jersione, Hellket777, LennardHofmann, LisafBia6531, Astuthiodit_1, 786, Biggs657, karapayneWMDE, Invadibot, maantietaja, Juan90264, Alter-paule, Beast1978, ItamarWMDE, Un1tY, Akuckartz, Hook696, Kent7301, joker88john, CucyNoiD, Nandana, Gaboe420, lucamauri, Giuliamocci, Cpaulf30, Lahi, Gq86, Af420, Bsandipan, GoranSMilovanovic, QZanden, KimKelting, LawExplorer, Lewizho99, Maathavan, _jensen, rosalieper, Neuronton, Scott_WUaS, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Mbch331
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