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proposal: x/exp/rand: add support for PRNG state serialisation and deserialisation #35886

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kortschak opened this issue Nov 28, 2019 · 4 comments
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proposal: x/exp/rand: add support for PRNG state serialisation and deserialisation #35886

kortschak opened this issue Nov 28, 2019 · 4 comments
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@kortschak
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kortschak commented Nov 28, 2019 •
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Background

Being able to serialise and deserialise PRNG state is a useful attribute for systems that are used in numerical simulations and game replay. Currently there is no safe way to save/restore PRNG state in either "math/rand" or "x/exp/rand" (the only way to do this currently would be to perform an unsafe conversion and save/restore that.

Proposal

I'd like to propose that the rand.PCGSource be given binary encoding/decoding methods. With this, users needing to save/restore PRNG state can either create a new rand.Source by directly constructing the rand.PCGSource and calling the Seed method, leaving them holding the value and so being able to use the serialisation methods, or alternatively type-assert to this type. No additional methods would be needed in rand.Source.
@gopherbot gopherbot added this to the Proposal milestone Nov 28, 2019
@mpx
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mpx commented Nov 28, 2019

This might fit into the rework for Go 2 (#21835, #26263).

Cc @robpike @josharian

@robpike
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robpike commented Nov 28, 2019

Seems reasonable to me, and since it's in exp the bar for change is very low. Send a CL?

@kortschak
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Happy to do that. What is your preferred serialisation format? Just simple binary? I have been thinking about this for our PRNG package in Gonum where I have been considering including the type since we have more than one, but that seems like overkill for here.

@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/209377 mentions this issue: rand: allow serialization of PRNG state

@golang golang locked and limited conversation to collaborators Nov 28, 2020
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