Maintaining the Legacy: Total-Random takes over pcg-cpp maintenance (Support for Win ARM64, MSVC fixes, and Modern C++)

Hi everyone,

Like many of you, we consider the PCG (Permuted Congruential Generator) family of PRNGs by Prof. Melissa O'Neill to be the gold standard for performance and statistical quality. However, the original pcg-cpp repository has been inactive for over 3 years, leaving many critical community-submitted patches unmerged.

To ensure this vital library remains usable in modern development environments, we have formed Total-Random, a community-led organization dedicated to maintaining and modernizing legacy RNG libraries.

We have just released our first stable version of the Total-Random/pcg-cpp fork, which includes:

Windows ARM64 Support: Integrated fixes for ARM64 architecture (thanks to Demonese/LuaSTG).

MSVC Compatibility: Resolved C2678 ambiguous operator errors and other MSVC-specific build failures.

Empty Base Class Optimization (EBCO): Enabled __declspec(empty_bases) for MSVC to ensure optimal memory layout, matching GCC/Clang behavior.

Robust 128-bit Fallback: Improved handling for platforms lacking native __uint128_t support.

Improved unxorshift: Replaced the recursive implementation with a more efficient iterative doubling loop to prevent stack issues and improve clarity.

Our goal is to keep the library header-only, bit-for-bit compatible with the original algorithm, and ready for C++11/17/20/23.

Community Recognition: We are honored to have received early attention and feedback from researchers in the field, including Ben Haller (@bhaller) from Cornell University. You can see the community discussion regarding our transition here:https://github.com/imneme/pcg-cpp/issues/106

Check us out on GitHub: Total-Random/pcg-cpp



We welcome PRs, issues, and feedback from the community. Let's keep the best PRNG alive and kicking!



Best regards, The Total-Random Team

https://redd.it/1pt25rg
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