The xorshift family is one of the top two RNGs in the modern day (the other being PCG). Unfortunately, "choosing the ideal member of the family" is nontrivial i

The xorshift family is one of the top two RNGs in the modern day (the other being PCG). Unfortunately, "choosing the ideal member of the family" is nontrivial if you're trying to eke out every bit of performance. The problem with the xorshift family is that it doesn't implement the nice auto-scaling (and thus auto-testing) that PCG has. Re-parameterizing it means inventing whole new numbers from scratch and hoping you plug them in correctly. Xorshift also has a rare-but-severe "stuck near zero" problem. The problem with the PCG family is that its trusted way of scaling (nobody likes the `_k` variants) relies on 128-bit multiplication (a modern member of the family at least reduces that to a mixed 128x64 multiply), which remains notably slow, unlike xorshift which only uses small integers. (But I must emphasize: all RNGs from other families either have worse variants of these problems, or give up on performance entirely. These concerns should be used only to select your preferred tradeoff between the two, there is no excuse for ever using any other RNG family unless you need cryptographic security)