A Decentralized, K-Ordered Unique ID Generator library in C.

It generates 128-bit k-ordered id's (time-ordered lexically). It can be run on each node in your infrastructure and it will generate conflict-free id's on-demand without coordination. Here, k-ordered means that id's generated within a given millisecond will be within a millisecond of one another in the id space as well.

{timestamp:64, worker_id:48, seq: 16}

• timestamp - unix timestamp (millisecond timestamp resolution)
• worker_id - pulled from a network interface a 48-bit MAC address
• seq - incremented each time id is requested in the same millisecond. This means each server can produce 2^16 - 1 unique id's per millisecond without overflow.

Example:

# hexadecimal representation of 128-bit id's in colon notation
# e.g. 0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5 = 8 byte unix timestamp, 2:0:12:ac:42:3 = 6 byte MAC address, 0:0 = 2 byte sequence number
....
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:0
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:1
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:2
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:3
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:4
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:5
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:6
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:7
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:8
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:9
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a5:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:a
....
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a8:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:0
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a8:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:1
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a8:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:2
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a8:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:3
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a8:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:4
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a8:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:5
0:0:1:84:40:9b:ff:a8:2:0:12:ac:42:3:0:6
....

NOTE: Since these id's are predictable, do not use them where predictability is not a desirable property like in passwords, security tokens or anything that can be easily guessed or brute-forced. Since it also exposes the identity of the machine that generated the id (via MAC address) it could be a problem for security sensitive applications.

struct snow_config takes below fields:

• interface - Set to available network interface to pull a 48-bit mac address as worker id.
• timestamp_path - To periodically save the current time. When snow_init() is called and if it detects that this file contains timestamp in the future or distant past then it refuses to generate id. This prevents problematic id's (that might break time-orderness) from getting distributed.
• allowable_downtime - Safeguard to prevent id generation if it detects it hasn't been run in a long time since this might be an indication that the system clock has been skewed far into the future.

Example:

interface="en0"
timestamp_path="/data/snowid/timestamp.out"
allowable_downtime=1665373570

Two main functions to generate id are provided:

A)

/*
* Attempts to set `dest_as_binary` with a 128-bit id (represented as byte 
* array). Return true if operation succeeds. 
*/
bool snow_get_id_as_binary(snow_id_binary_t snowid_as_bin);

B)

/*
* Attempts to set `dest` with a `struct snow_id` that consists of individual 
* components of the id. Return true if operation succeeds.
*/
bool snow_get_id(snow_id_t *snowid);

The third function to convert A) from B).

/*
* Convenience function that attempts to convert `snowid` of type `struct 
* snow_id` into binary `dest_as_bin`. Return true if operation succeeds.
*/
bool snow_id_convert(snow_id_binary_t snowid_as_bin, const snow_id_t *snowid);

For full usage of rest of the public API's (snowid.h), checkout main.c that provides a driver program on how to use the library from an application (e.g. a (web)service).

• Tested on macOS and GNU/Linux (via Docker). PR welcome to make it work on Windows.
• C99 compatible C compiler (e.g. GCC or Clang).
• This library doesn't depend on any external libraries.

$ make

This will create a binary by the name snowid which is an example driver program and run it like this:

$ ./snowid

and it should print a series of time ordered unique id's.

$ make test

This should run a series of unit tests to verify the basic functionality of the library.

Debug mode build and test can be enabled like below:

$ DEBUGBUILD=true make test

Timing benchmark below on how long it takes to generate 100,000 unique ids on my MacBook 2.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 (note this may vary based on your machine):

$ time make bench

real    0m0.613s
user    0m0.089s
sys     0m0.066s

If you have python3 in your system, then u can run it like below:

$ python3 -m timeit -n 3 "__import__('os').system('make bench')"
...
3 loops, best of 5: 509 msec per loop

There is a Dockerfile which provides a way to build the code in GNU/Linux.

1) docker build -t snowid -f Dockerfile .
2) docker run -it --rm snowid

1) docker build -t unit -f Dockerfile.test .
2) docker run -it --rm unit

1) docker build -t benchmark -f Dockerfile.bench .
2) docker run -it --rm benchmark

• General inspiration is from Twitter snowflake id generator.

• The idea/design of snowid is borrowed from BMC's (formerly Boundary) flake server written in Erlang. More details are in the original post.

MIT License Copyright (c) 2022 beyonddream