A Brief History of Random Numbers
<i>Pseudo-</i>random!<p>A new programmer reading this article would come away with the impression that, if they need random numbers, they should use xorshift or PCG, when in reality they should be calling getentropy(), or, if a syscall is too expensive, using a CSPRNG (e.g. ChaCha or BLAKE3) seeded with getentropy(). We now have RNGs that are both secure and really, really fast -- multiple GB&#x2F;s fast -- so there are very few circumstances where a PRNG is truly necessary.