Using drand48_r as random number generator in C
c, gnu, macos, openmp, random
Solution
I don't really see the gain of using `drand48_r` over `erand48`. `erand48` has the same type of random generator as `drand48` but compared to that receives the state of the random generator as a function parameter, so it perfectly does the job.
The `_r` extensions store the result in place (the second parameter) and return an error code that is always guaranteed to be `0`. I don't see much use in all of this. I'd stick to the POSIX interfaces (in particular `erand48`).
Problem
So i've been writing some applications in C and using OpenMP for parallelization. I implemented a Monte-Carlo Pi estimate and found that the normal rand() function is not reentrent and thread-safe. The recommendation is to use the drand48_r option. Now here is the problem, my application compiles fine on Linux eg. Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS but does not compile on Mac OS X. The compile error on OS X is. simple.c:7: error: storage size of ‘randBuffer’ isn’t known The code used as the simple example is: ``` #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { double x; struct drand48_data randBuffer; srand48_r(time(NULL), &randBuffer); drand48_r(&randBuffer, &x); printf("Random number: %f\n", x); return EXIT_SUCCESS; } ``` I read up about it and I found a note in the man pages that, These functions are GNU extensions and are not portable. Here is a link to it: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man3/drand48_r.3.html So I have a number of questions; - What are GNU extensions and what makes it non portable? - What alternatives do I have for random number generation on OS X that is also thread-safe? Well that is about it. The example is compiled with gcc as, gcc simple.c -o simple