On Tue, Oct 11, 2022, Colton Lewis wrote: > Sean Christopherson <seanjc@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > Ya, I'm trippling (quadrupling?) down on my suggestion to improve the > > APIs. Users > > should not be able to screw up like this, i.e. shouldn't need comments > > to warn > > readers, and adding another call to get a random number shouldn't affect > > unrelated > > code. > > Previous calls to PRNGs always affect later calls to PRNGs. That's how > they work. Ya, that's not the type of bugs I'm worried about. > This "screw up" would be equally likely with any API because the caller > always needs to decide if they should reuse the same random number or need a > new one. I disagree, the in/out parameter _requires_ the calling code to store the random number in a variable. Returning the random number allows consuming the number without needing an intermediate variable, e.g. if (random_bool()) <do stuff> which makes it easy to avoid an entire class of bugs.
