It is easy to bring generator into bad state by providing bad seed about prando HOT 1 CLOSED

Hey @burdakovd,

(Sorry, for some reason I missed this issue report before, and only saw it now)

Thanks for your report.

1. You're right, empty strings are producing an invalid internal seed (0). The same was true of a passed seed of value 0; they cannot be shifted so the generator gets stuck. I've fixed this issue. Seed generation is a bit safer now, recovering from cases like that (simply setting the seed to 1).
2. I actually agree with you on the string seed issue. Strings with a very close alphanumeric similarity like "41" and "42" would produce a close hash, because it was just a char code count. I didn't want to employ any big third-party hashing algorithm because I wanted to make the library small, but it's clear the current solution was not good enough in real world applications. I've added a change that now passes the string-based hash through the internal xorshifter function, therefore making the string hash result more random-looking. This is a breaking change since the same string seeds now produce different internal seeds.

Both changes are now part of the 4.0.0 release, a major bump due to the breaking changes.

Thanks again!

from prando.