Go's math/random
library is missing a function to generate 64-bit numbers. This has been an open issue for about four years. In the meantime, what does a workaround look like?
The easiest would be to call rand.Uint32()
twice:
func Uint64() uint64 {
return uint64(rand.Uint32())<<32 + uint64(rand.Uint32())
}
Another option is to call rand.Read()
(was added in Go 1.7) to read 8 bytes, then use the encoding/binary
package to obtain a uint64
value from it:
func Uint64() uint64 {
buf := make([]byte, 8)
rand.Read(buf) // Always succeeds, no need to check error
return binary.LittleEndian.Uint64(buf)
}
Note: as the doc of rand.Read()
states, it always reads as many bytes as the length of the passed slice, and it always returns nil
error, so no need to check error in this case.
Note #2: you could also use binary.BigEndian
instead of binary.LittleEndian
, as we're generating a random number using all its bytes, order of bytes is completely irrelevant.
You can also read 8 random bytes, and convert to a uint64
b := make([]byte, 8)
_, err := rand.Read(b)
return binary.LittleEndian.Uint64(b), err
You can call rand.Uint64()
directly: r := rand.Uint64()
Uint64 returns a pseudo-random 64-bit value as a uint64 from the default Source.
https://golang.org/pkg/math/rand/#Uint64
This is available in versions 1.8
and up: changelog