One way in which this could have come about is that Math.random wasn’t supported in all relevant browsers when the library author wrote the library. So they had to roll their own randomness with blackjack and hookers. Later the web standards evolved and the author was able to remove the custom code, but now had people relying on his library’s exposing a getRandom function.

[–] Billygoat@piefed.social 38 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You see this kind of stuff in C all the time when a code base supports multiple OSs by using macros.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago

Yes, though at least with C you have the compiler to optimize the cruft out of your binary and end up with a nice, clean program.

With JavaScript this is going to incur some runtime cost everywhere this library is used, even if it only happens once when getting optimized out by the JIT compiler.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Pretty sure that math.random is decades old.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Pretty sure OP’s image is hyperbole.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Right. I'd agree this is a thing that happens, I just thought you were addressing this one in particular

[–] meekah@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Pretty sure many codebases running today (even JS ones) are older

[–] Sv443@sh.itjust.works 7 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Math.random() was always in the spec: https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-262_1st_edition_june_1997.pdf

[–] sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 1 points 17 hours ago

Remember IE? Yeah. Probably responsible for a lot of now-superfluous things like this theory suggests.

[–] meekah@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 21 hours ago

Gotta admit, didn't think it was that old

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

And? I don't know how to check but I'd guess math.random was included from the beginning.