Rename thread_rng to ThreadRng::new()?

[vks]

This would be more consistent with OsRng, EntropyRng, JitterRng, ReseedingRng and BlockRng.

[dhardy]

I do not support this. Calling thread_rng has low overhead (just creating another reference) and could be optimised to just a check and pointer copy. The ThreadRng type is just a handle to another object; unfortunately this is not obvious from the name so ThreadRng::new sounds like it is doing a lot more work than merely creating a handle.

OsRng is also just a handle really and I did think about replacing its new with e.g. os_rng, but didn't see much point.

[vks]

I don't share that sentiment, new() is just the constructor-by-convention. It is often very lightweight, though not necessarily so. To me it seems like the constructor for ThreadRng (thread_rng) has a non-idiomatic name.

ThreadRng::new sounds like it is doing a lot more work than merely creating a handle.

It is doing a lot of work if it is the first call in the thread.

OsRng is also just a handle really

That is my point, right now we are inconsistent.

[pitdicker]

I wouldn't remove thread_rng(), it is used too much. But adding ThreadRng::new() seems harmless to me.

[dhardy]

Having both will just lead to pointless style wars.

[dhardy]

I agree that we shouldn't simply have thread_rng() -> impl Rng because this prevents users from embedding the type in structs, (which may be useful even though it isn't common usage); hence ThreadRng::new() does make intuitive sense, so this may be a good option.

See also this point about replacing ThreadRng with perhaps two alternatives: StrongRng and WeakRng.

In any case, I think we should postpone these ideas until after the 0.5 release.

[dhardy]

Since there do appear to be quite a few people who watch this repository and this is mostly style, can I get some more opinions on this, i.e. do you prefer writing thread_rng() or ThreadRng::new()? We could also have both, but it is redundant.

Either way, we already have the ThreadRng type (fn thread_rng() -> ThreadRng).

[dhardy]

There is almost no interest on this, so I guess we can just forget it.