math/rand: randFloat64() gives the same result irrespective of the number of times run

[odeke-em]

In the docs at https://golang.org/pkg/math/rand/#Float64, it says

However, I ran tests on both the playground http://play.golang.org/p/oK5GR_9Z_N and my computer
and it always gave me the same result 0.6046602879796196 no matter how many times I ran this. I found this out when testing out a program that simulates different sleep times to simulate contention for resources.

My test was:

$ cat randTest.go
package main

import (
    "log"
    "math/rand"
)

func main() {
    log.Println(rand.Float64())
}

$ go version >> randResult.txt && for i in $(seq 1 100); do sleep 0.25;go run randTest.go 2>> randResult.txt;done;cat randResult.txt | cut -d" " -f3 | sort | uniq
0.6046602879796196
devel

And from the playground

That is the exact same result I got from nacl and darwin.

[odeke-em]

Never mind: false alarm, just luck of sleep got me not to realize that since we use the same source all the time, the results are always deterministic.

[odeke-em]

I was just too used to rand* producing at least pseudo random starting values that weren't the same everytime

[cespare]

From the package docs: "Top-level functions, such as Float64 and Int, use a
default shared Source that produces a deterministic sequence of values each
time a program is run. Use the Seed function to initialize the default
Source if different behavior is required for each run."
On Dec 23, 2015 6:33 AM, "Emmanuel T Odeke" notifications@github.com
wrote:

In the docs at https://golang.org/pkg/math/rand/#Float64, it says
[image: screen shot 2015-12-23 at 5 24 18 am]
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/4898263/11976449/7b1ece54-a935-11e5-9f8f-cf4a28fcdd98.png

However, I ran tests on both the playground
http://play.golang.org/p/oK5GR_9Z_N and my computer
and it always gave me the same result 0.6046602879796196 no matter how
many times I ran this. I found this out when testing out a program that
simulates different sleep times to simulate contention for resources.

My test was:

$ cat randTest.go
package main

import (
"log"
"math/rand"
)

func main() {
log.Println(rand.Float64())
}

$ go version >> randResult.txt && for i in $(seq 1 100); do sleep 0.25;go run randTest.go 2>> randResult.txt;done;cat randResult.txt | cut -d" " -f3 | sort | uniq

0.6046602879796196
devel

And from the playground

That is the exact same result I got from nacl and darwin.

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