If you want something faster, Blake2b is crypto strong and fast on all modern CPUs. Just need to seed it with a random seed, and you're happy. Failing that, really recent CPUs can do SHA256 in hardware, but they have tiny market penetration currently. You can, of course, use any AES hardware offload also as a randomness generator, that has much wider support in CPUs.
Is there an existing PRNG in Boost.Random that would be better than mersenne to use in a "bulk" uuid generator typedef?
No idea. I avoid Boost dependencies when I can, and Blake2b source code is well written. Note that probably the hardware randomness generator instruction RDRAND in Intel CPUs will be sufficient for UUID generation. It passes all the tests for crypto strength, but a lot of people don't trust Intel. Many ARM chips also have hardware randomness generator offload. I forget the coprocessor instruction. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/