I am currently developing a distributed application where many clients need
to generate unique 64-bit random numbers which will be used as keys. I am
having problems getting boost to do this. For my first attempt, I tried
something like the following:
boost::mt19937 RandomNumberGenerator::s_algorithm;
boost::uniform_int<unsigned long long>
RandomNumberGenerator::s_range(
std::numeric_limits<unsigned long long>::min(),
std::numeric_limits<unsigned long long>::max());
boost::variate_generator
RandomNumberGenerator::s_rng(RandomNumberGenerator::s_algorithm,
RandomNumberGenerator::s_range);
I had two issues though:
1. Is this really giving me random 64 bit numbers, or is it just generating
32-bit numbers and then doing bit expansion?
2. The values always started with the same number.
Trying to find a fix for #2, I though of using a hashed GUID as a seed. The
problem is I noticed the seed value takes a 32 bit int, which essentially
means a 1/2^32 chance of the first value colliding even if chosen completely
randomly, which is unacceptable for my application.
I am back where I started. Is there any clean way to use boost to generate
random 64-bit intergers, when the same application is going to be run across
multiple computers?
