Standardize on xoroshiro128** as our basic PRNG algorithm, eliminating
a bunch of platform dependencies as well as fundamentally-obsolete PRNG
code. In addition, this API replacement will ease replacing the
algorithm again in future, should that become necessary.
xoroshiro128** is a few percent slower than the drand48 family,
but it can produce full-width 64-bit random values not only 48-bit,
and it should be much more trustworthy. It's likely to be noticeably
faster than the platform's random(), depending on which platform you
are thinking about; and we can have non-global state vectors easily,
unlike with random(). It is not cryptographically strong, but neither
are the functions it replaces.
Fabien Coelho, reviewed by Dean Rasheed, Aleksander Alekseev, and myself
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.22.394.2105241211230.165418@pseudo
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.
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