v1.0

[JkarVN]

🚀 Release 1.0: Modernized & Robust PCG-CPP

Welcome to the first official stable release of the pcg-cpp library maintained by Total-Random.
This version marks a comprehensive modernization of the original PCG library by Melissa O'Neill, focusing on cross-platform compatibility, performance optimizations, and a professional developer experience.

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🌟 Key Features & Improvements

1. Modern CMake Build System

• Replaced legacy Makefiles with a robust, industry-standard CMake system.
• Added full support for find_package(pcg-cpp), making integration into other projects effortless.
• Native support for ctest to run the full suite of 42 correctness tests automatically.
• Hardware-specific optimizations are automatically configured for MSVC, GCC, and Clang.

2. Native Windows ARM64 Support

• Optimized 128-bit multiplication for ARM64 architectures using __umulh intrinsics.
• Verified compatibility with modern Windows-on-ARM devices
  (Surface Pro, Apple Silicon via VMs).

3. Performance & Memory Optimizations

• Empty Base Class Optimization (EBCO):
  Implemented __declspec(empty_bases) for MSVC, ensuring the smallest possible memory footprint for RNG objects.
• Optimized unxorshift:
  Integrated community performance patches for inverse xorshift operations.
• Zero-Overhead:
  Maintained the strict C++ philosophy of providing high-level abstractions without runtime costs.

4. Enterprise-Grade Compatibility (MSVC Fixes)

Resolved long-standing compiler errors and warnings on Visual Studio:

• Fixed C2678 (ambiguous operator) in set_stream.
• Fixed C1090 (PDB API call failure) during parallel builds.
• Eliminated shadowing warnings (is_mcg) and type conversion warnings
  (C4244, C4127).
• Ensured Clean Build status with strict warning levels
  (/W4 for MSVC, -Wall for GCC/Clang).

5. C++ Standard Compliance

• Made result_type in seed_seq_from public to strictly follow the SeedSequence concept required by the C++ Standard Library (STL).
• Guaranteed seamless interoperability with standard engines like std::mt19937.

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⚙️ Automated Quality Assurance (CI)

Implemented GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline, automatically testing every commit on:

• Windows: MSVC 2019 / 2022
• Linux: GCC 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 and Clang 15 / 16 / 17
• macOS: Apple Clang (latest)

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📦 Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/Total-Random/pcg-cpp.git
cd pcg-cpp
cmake -B build
cmake --build build

# Run correctness tests
cd build && ctest -C Release

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This discussion was created from the release v1.0.

[bhaller]

Hi @JkarVN! I'm looking this over now, and plan to try switching over to it. It would be helpful if it was more clear where changes came from. For example, in pcg_extras.hpp the change to unxorshift() comes from PR imneme/pcg-cpp#82. I would suggest that (a) in the code you put a comment "This fix is from imneme/pcg-cpp#82" to lead people back to the origin of the change, and (b) in that PR's discussion you add a comment, "Merged in Release 1 of the Total-Random fork". Similarly for most/all of the other code changes. Since you don't have control over the original pcg-cpp repo, this sort of bookkeeping seems to me to be very useful for tracking which issues/PRs have been handled in Total-Random, and for letting people (like me) who diff between the original pcg-cpp repo and the Total-Random fork see where the changes come from. Thanks!