uuid6-ietf-draft VS cuid2

https://github.com/uuid6/uuid6-ietf-draft/issues/27

Why not UUIDv7?

What if a new UUID version could be designed that would take the randomness of UUID4 and combine it with a timestamp prefix? This would make the UUID increase overall, but not locally – due to the random postfix. The random part ensures uniqueness when a high generation rate is necessary and also makes the UUIDs hard to predict – it’s not possible to guess the previous, or next UUID. It’s fairly simple to devise a custom UUID scheme, but fortunately, there is a new Internet-Draft (at the time of writing) defining new pseudo-sequential UUID versions that aim to solve exactly this issue: draft-peabody-dispatch-new-uuid-format-04. The current state and progress can be viewed at IETF Datatracker.

Brad Peabody did the original -00 draft, which was discussed as an FYI at an IEFT meeting in March 2020. See [1], around 50 lines from the bottom.

Kyzer Davis has since submitted two further revisions -01 and -02 in April and October 2021. See history in [2].

The current -02 draft is due to expire in April 2022. Presumably Kyzer Davis will try to get it discussed before then.

The GitHub repo tracking these drafts is https://github.com/uuid6/uuid6-ietf-draft/.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/107/materials/minutes-1...

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-peabody-dispatch-new-...

At the moment anyway, that XML link won't render per an XML parsing error. For anyone who wants a quick look at what these XML docs look like here's one for UUID6 [0].

[0] https://github.com/uuid6/uuid6-ietf-draft/blob/master/draft-...

The CUID readme [1] explains that there's no real point to K-sortable on modern hardware:

[1] https://github.com/paralleldrive/cuid2?tab=readme-ov-file#no...

There's a comparison in the README of the project:

https://github.com/paralleldrive/cuid2#the-contenders

Some of the arguments mentioned are explained elsewhere in the README, others are assumed.

One argument standing out for me is the lack of collision-resistance for UUIDv4 which is surprising for me and I didn't spot any sources for that argument.

Another argument is the entropy source where they go about that Math.random is not reliable as a single entropy source but glimpsing at the source code, they sprinkle the CUID with Math.random data.

I am no expert in ID security, so I am not qualified to speak about the validity of their arguments, only that there's insufficient information to validate without prior knowledge about the problem domain.

I'm recently finding cuid2 to be the best of these alternative GUIDs. They seem to have all of the benefits for what you would want to use a GUID for, but none of the drawbacks of existing implementations.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/paralleldrive/cuid2#the-contenders

I've just released v2.0.0 of my cuid2 python port. The original cuid2 package comes from JS world by ParallelDrive. They have a lot of the reasons to use Cuid2 posted in their repo, including

I recently wrote a Go implementation of CUID2 because I could not find an existing one. It is not hello-world, but it is not duff's device either, which by the way neither could explain what it did from just the raw code in isolation.

I think this implementation is the original one. It has the following to say about why it exists. And what it is good for:

There's also https://github.com/paralleldrive/cuid2 which likely should be added to this as it is likely one of the better ones out there now.

If you're using prisma then you can use CUID or CUID2 to manually generate it.