For non-simulation purposes, however, using a fast-key-erasure[2] ChaCha20 or AES-256-CTR RNG has served me well enough, and doesn't leave me worrying if maybe someone could abuse the RNG for whatever purposes (e.g. cheating in a game by using RNG manipulation).
Like this website, the PCG website also makes rather bold claims and has no peer review to back it up. What's the deal with this?
I wish, as in the romantic ideal of science, a consensus would emerge of what “the best” PRNG are, and how to choose among them. Instead, you seem to have many academics promoting their own ones (Vigna with the xoroshiro family, O’Neill with PCG, now this guy Overton with Romu).
And in effect every programming language has to go and make sensible default choices, while the experts in PRNG refuse to make unambiguous recommendations.
(FWIW, I’d advocate to have, by default, a cryptographically secure PRNG, and offer a choice of faster ones (like the three mentioned above) that have to be chosen explicitly, maybe naming them InsecureXYZ, for applications where speed is paramount.)
I would like to see a systematic comparison, some way of arriving at an answer to the question of which of these is "best."
I suspect that large part of the problem is that there are not all that many academics in the field, promoting their own or otherwise. Ultra high speed PRNGs are just a bit of a niche, and the widely used stuff is already good enough for many industry uses.
O'Neill also uses the same methods to study PCG.