How does one generate a random number in Apple's Swift language?

Question

I realize the Swift book provided an implementation of a random number generator. Is the best practice to copy and paste this implementation in one\'s own program? Or is t

Answer 1

@jstn's answer is good, but a bit verbose. Swift is known as a protocol-oriented language, so we can achieve the same result without having to implement boilerplate code for every class in the integer family, by adding a default implementation for the protocol extension.

public extension ExpressibleByIntegerLiteral {
    public static func arc4random() -> Self {
        var r: Self = 0
        arc4random_buf(&r, MemoryLayout.size)
        return r
    }
}

Now we can do:

let i = Int.arc4random()
let j = UInt32.arc4random()

and all other integer classes are ok.