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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to DualMix128 – A fast, simple PRNG passing PractRand (32TB) and BigCrush

Hi HN, I'd like to share DualMix128, a pseudo-random number generator I developed. It's written in C and achieves very high speed while maintaining strong statistical properties for non-cryptographic use. GitHub (MIT License): https://github.com/the-othernet/DualMix128 Key points: * *Fast:* Benchmarked at ~0.36 ns per 64-bit generation on GCC 11.4 (-O3 -march=native). This was over 2x faster than `xoroshiro128++` (~0.74 ns) and competitive with `wyrand` (~0.36 ns) in the same tests. (Benchmark code/results in repo). * *Robust:* Passes the full TestU01 BigCrush suite…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    LoopMix128 is a fast C PRNG I wrote for non-cryptographic tasks. GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/danielcota/LoopMix128 Highlights: * ~0.37 ns/value (GCC 11.4, -O3 -march=native), 98% faster than xoroshiro128++ and PCG64. * Passes TestU01 BigCrush & PractRand (32TB). * Guaranteed 2^128 period. * Proven injective (192-bit state) via Z3 SMT solver; allows parallel streams. * Core requires only stdint.h. Seeking feedback on design, use cases, or further testing.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Faster LZMA decoder for x86 CPUs (patch for XZ Utils). - faster_lzma_decoder_x86.patch

    2021 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4MW

    I wanted QR codes to be really simple to implement everywhere and for everyone. So I spent some time on my weekends trying to write a fast QR generator module for Apache, and here are the results: ab -n 5000 -c 100 http://lilqr.com/qr Requests per second: 4301.78 [#/sec] (mean)

    2011 · lilqr.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Repo: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/xcc700 Hi Everyone! I just wrote my first compiler! - single pass, recursive descent, direct emission - generates REL ELF binaries, runnable using ESP-IDF elf_loader - very basic features only, just enough for self-hosting - treats the Xtensa CPU as a stack machine for simplicity, no register allocation / window usage - compilable on Mac, probably also Linux, can cross-compile for esp32 there - wrote for fun / cyberdeck project Sample output from esp32: xcc700.elf xcc700.c -o /d/cc.elf [ xcc700 ] BUILD COMPLETED >…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    forkrun is the culmination of a 10-year-long journey focused on "how to make shell parallelization fast". What started as a standard "fork jobs in a loop" has turned into a lock-free, CAS-retry-loop-free, SIMD-accelerated, self-tuning, NUMA aware shell-based stream parallelization engine that is (mostly) a drop-in replacement for xargs -P and GNU parallel. On my 14-core/28-thread i9-7940x, forkrun achieves: * 200,000+ batch dispatches/sec (vs ~500 for GNU Parallel) * ~95–99% CPU utilization across all 28 logical cores, even when the workload is non-existant (bash no-ops / `:`)…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Morning HN. Random number generation feels is a somewhat underrepresented topic in the C++ realm. There is a lot of questionable info about it found online and even the standard library is quite behind the times in terms of it's algorithms. It suffers from trying to accommodate sometimes impractical standard requirements and has several ways of getting significantly bad statistical results. This leaves a lot easily achievable performance & quality on the table. So, being a mathematician who mostly works with stochastic models and wants these models to run fast and well, I embarked on a…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I have posted a much earlier version of this over a year ago [0]. Since then a lot has changed. Obviously, the name has changed. This happened for the paper publication [1]. I have also optimized the speed, integrated ISA-L for special cases, limited the compression-ratio-dependent maximum memory consumption, and finally added parallelized CRC32 computation, which adds ~5% overhead no matter the number of cores used. At this point, I am leaning towards calling it production-ready although there are still many ideas for improvements. Redoing the benchmarks of the older Show HN, would look…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Haskell re-implementation of STOKE, the stochastic superoptimizer - blaze/notebooks/tutorial.ipynb at master · bollu/blaze

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    It is based on phase noise, consumes less than 60 LUT4s/FFs and achieves up to 7.99 bits of entropy per byte. Feel free to comment if you have any questions, ideas or thoughts :)

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Pseudorandom generator written in Go using CPU context switch - maxamel/BitGenGo

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Properties of a Novel Binary Representation of Integers using Base-𝜙 - irradix/paper.md at main · DOSAYGO-STUDIO/irradix

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    A fast and memory-optimized string library for C++ - btwael/SuperString

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I want to share a really dumb, but very practical project I have packaged this summer, to perform operations on strings much faster. I was using Python to work with a multi-terabyte newline-delimited file. Reading, splitting, and shuffling it was a nightmare. So, I wrapped a trivial hardware-friendly heuristic I've been using for the last few years into a CPython library. The part I enjoyed the most is implementing SIMD behavior without SIMD instructions... Using 64-bit words to work at 8-bit granularity. Unlike conventional SIMD, the code would remain the same for ~~almost~~ any hardware.…

    2023 · ashvardanian.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    A simple re-implementation of Google's sparsehash as a learning excercise. - qpfiffer/Simple-Sparsehash

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16TF

    I’d originally launched my app: Private LLM[1][2] on HN around 10 months ago, with a single RedPajama Chat 3B model. The app has come a long way since then. About a month ago, I added support for 4-bit OmniQuant quantized Mixtral 8x7B Instruct model, and it seems to outperform Q4 models at inference speed and Q8 models at text generation quality, while consuming only about 24GB of RAM[3] at 8k context length. The trick is: a) to use a better quantization algorithm and b) to use unquantized embeddings and the MoE gates (the overhead is quite small). Other notable features include many more…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  17. 17LR

    I just noticed it takes literally ~5 minutes to train millions parameters on slow CPU...but before you call Yudkowsky that "it's over", an important note: the main bottleneck is the corpus size, params are just 'cleverness' but given limited info it's powerless. Anyway, here is the project: https://github.com/bggb7781-collab/lrnnsmdds/tree/main couple of notes: 1. single C file, no dependencies. Below are literally all the "dependencies", not even custom header (copy paste from the top of the single c file): #define _POSIX_C_SOURCE 200809L #include #include…

    Apr 2026 · raw.githubusercontent.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    I wanted to know how fast a 26B mixture-of-experts model could run on a desktop CPU with no GPU. Got ~40 tok/s single-stream (lossless) and ~124 batched. The surprising part was the byte budget: for this model you compress the output head (32% of per-token bytes), not the experts (16%). The writeup has the bandwidth roofline and the dead-ends; the repo has the reproducible recipe. Happy to answer questions. Repo: https://github.com/arun-prasath2005/gemma4-cpu-moe

    Jun 2026 · apeg.dev · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hello HN, I'm very excited to have finished a gzip decoder that can speed up decompression using threads. On my Ryzen 3900X, I measured a 8x speedup over standard gzip, reaching 1.6 GB/s for a synthetic file with a consistent compression ratio of 1.3. A functional decompressor like this is kind of a first, that's why I am excited. Pragzip implements the two-staged decompression idea put forward with pugz, which unfortunately only works with gzipped text files not arbitrary files and has many more limitations. I think my main contribution over pugz might be a fast (~10 MB/s)…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20MN

    Any suggestion is welcome: https://github.com/gbonacini/nuclear_random_number_generator

    2022 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I built a specialized package of DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (originally 284B total parameters, 13B active), preserving reasoning, tool calling and coding capabilities: https://huggingface.co/steadfastgaze/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-... I let it write a minimal C compiler targeting ARM64, then test the result with Fibonacci and FizzBuzz programs, and it succeeded in less than 1 hour, with the full recording at: https://youtu.be/XiwSilmV8B0 You can run it on Silicon Macs with my engine https://github.com/steadfastgaze/MoEspresso, while one of the…

    Aug 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hello everyone, After recreating the accuracy/rough speed from David Page's implementation in hlb-CIFAR10 0.1.0 (18.1s on an A100, SXM4, Colab), it was down to some basic NVIDIA kernel profiling to figure out which operations were the long poles in the tent. Perhaps (somewhat?) unsurprisingly, the NCHW NHWC thrash was the worst part, but unfortunately the GhostBatchNorm was a barrier even using the faster-on-Ampere channels_last memory format. A quick note before continuing -- some may find the use of a convolutional network and on CIFAR10 to be curious. A quick answer to that would be…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    An experimental high-performance DNS query bruteforce tool built with AF_XDP for extremely fast and accurate bulk DNS lookups. - c3l3si4n/pugdns

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Facebook's Katran looked too scary (and I don't do C++), so I thought I would investigate using XDP/eBPF to redirect packets at high speed and Go to do the control plane work of health-checking backed servers and managing configuration. With luck the resulting binary should be easy to deploy by non-developers. It's still not mature, but seems to work. Code was written in a very exploratory manner, and I'm not a developer so it is quite shocking at the moment, but I aim to improve it. It is intended to be horizontally scalable with ECMP and has been tested on service providing…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

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