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:<br>
<br>        boost::mt19937 RandomNumberGenerator::s_algorithm;<br><div id=":6j" class="ArwC7c ckChnd"><br>        boost::uniform_int&lt;unsigned long long&gt; RandomNumberGenerator::s_range(<br>            std::numeric_limits&lt;unsigned long long&gt;::min(), std::numeric_limits&lt;unsigned long long&gt;::max());<br>

<br>        boost::variate_generator&lt;boost::mt19937&amp;, boost::uniform_int&lt;unsigned long long&gt; &gt; <br>            RandomNumberGenerator::s_rng(RandomNumberGenerator::s_algorithm, RandomNumberGenerator::s_range);<br>

<br>I had two issues though:<br><br>1.  Is this really giving me random 64 bit numbers, or is it just generating 32-bit numbers and then doing bit expansion?<br><br>2.  The values always started with the same number.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>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?</div>