Getting big random numbers in C/C++

Question

Standard rand() function gives numbers not big enough for me: I need unsigned long long ones. How do we get really big random numbers? I tried modifying a simple hash function but it's too big, takes too long to run and never produces numbers which are less than 1e5!!

Answer 1

You can easily do this with std::uniform_int_distribution<unsigned long long>.

Simple example code (taken from here, modified to use unsigned long long):

#include <random>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::random_device rd;
    std::mt19937 gen(rd());
    std::uniform_int_distribution<unsigned long long> dis(lowerBorder, upperBorder);

    for (int n=0; n<10; ++n)
        std::cout << dis(gen) << ' ';
    std::cout << '\n';
}

Note that the seeding of the mersenne twister as done here for demo purposes is not perfect, for example see here.

Answer 2

Here's a portable C99 solution that returns a random 64-bit number:

unsigned long long llrand() {
    unsigned long long r = 0;

    for (int i = 0; i < 5; ++i) {
        r = (r << 15) | (rand() & 0x7FFF);
    }

    return r & 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFULL;
}

Explanation: rand() returns integers in the range 0 to RAND_MAX and RAND_MAX is only guaranteed to be at least 32,767 (15 random bits). long long is guaranteed to have 64 bits but may be larger.