[ot]

> It kind of doesn’t matter if there are users [...] The point is that PCG is better

No that's not the point that the article makes and that I'm questioning, it says "everyone shrugged" which implies consensus, and I'm asking for evidence of that consensus, not of the objective quality of the two generators.

Also I don't think that that paragraph is even close to demonstrating "objectively better": the author of PCG pointed out one arbitrary metric, minimum state size, where PCG beats old variants of xorshift* on a statistical test suite, and in the meantime much better variants have come out. That metric is meaningless since everyone uses much bigger state anyway.

RNGs are a tricky subject, there isn't a singular measure of quality, statistical tests are necessary but not sufficient. The best testament to RNG quality is wide adoption, which builds confidence that there aren't undiscovered failure modes.

[camel-cdr]

Agreed, you can get minimum state size by just using a linear counter and a sufficiently good hash function.

The metric is quite useless, what matters way more IMO is the quality of scaled down variants.