hckrnws

> UUID versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are already outdated.

Interesting comment, since v4 is the only version that provides the maximal random bits and is recommended for use as a primary key for non-correlated rows in several distributed databases to counter hot-spotting and privacy issues.

Edit: Context links for reference, these recommend UUIDv4:

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/uuid

https://docs.cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design#uui...

I think "outdated" was a poor choice of words. It is a failure to meet application requirements, which has more to do with design than age. Every standardized UUID is expressly prohibited in some application contexts due to material deficiencies, including v4. That includes newer standards like v7 and v8.

In practice, most orgs with sufficiently large and complex data models use the term "UUID" to mean a pure 128-bit value that makes no reference to the UUID standard. It is not difficult to find yourself with a set of application requirements that cannot be satisfied with a standardized UUID.

The sophistication of our use case scenarios for UUIDs exceeds their original design assumptions. They don't readily support every operation you might want to do on a UUID.

Yeah, I thought it was a strange comment, too. v7 is great when you explicitly need monotonicity, but encoded timestamps can expose information about your system. v4 is still very valid.

Yeah v4 is the goto, and you only use something else if you have a very specific reason like needing rough ordering

Deterministic uuids is a very standard usecase

You're talking about the hash-based UUIDv3/v5? I haven't found examples of those being used, but I'm curious.

Using MD5 or 122 bits of a SHA1 hash seems questionable now that both algorithms have known collisions. Using 122 bits of a SHA2/3 seems pretty limited too. Maybe if you've got trusted inputs?

Common one is if you want two structs deemed "equivalent" based on a few fields to get the same ID, and you're only concerned about accidental collision. There are valid use cases for that, but I've also seen it misused often.

v7 rough ordering also helps as a PK in certain sharded DBs, while others want random, or nonsharded ones usually just serial int.

Have you seen UUIDv3/v5 used there though? I've seen lots of md5 historically and sha variants recently, but not the UUID approach.

I remember using them in a massive SQL query that needed to generate a GIS data set from multiple tables with an ungodly amount of JOINs and sub-queries to achieve ID stability. Don't ask :p

For those ~~curious~~ worried, no, this was not a security sensitive context.

If you want 128 bits of randomness why not use 128 bits of randomness? A random UUID presupposes the random number has to fit in UUID format.

122 bits of randomness.

It's the same reason we use UTF-8. It's well supported. UUIDs are well supported by most languages and storage systems. You don't have to worry about endianness or serialization. It's not a thing you have to think about. It's already been solved and optimized.

byte[16] is well supported by most languages and storage systems.

Sure.

Now generate your random ID. Did you use a CSPRNG, or were your devs lazy and just used a PRNG? Are you doing that every time you're generating one of these IDs in any system that might need to communicate with your API? Or maybe they just generated one random number, and now they're adding 1 every time.

Now transfer it over a wire. Are you sure the way you're serializing it is how the remote system will deserialize it? Maybe you should use a string representation, since character transmission is a solved problem with UTF-8. OK, so who decides what that canonical representation is? How do we make it recognizable as an ID without looking like something that people should do arithmetic with?

It's not like random IDs were a new idea in 2002.

None of these are rocket-science problems, they're just standardization issues. You build a library with your generate_id/serialize_id/deserialize_id functions that work with a wrapper type, and tell your devs to use that library. UUID libraries are exactly that, except backed by an RFC.

Of course they're not rocket science. But, the question here is, "Why don't you use random 16 bytes instead of a UUIDv4?" It's not a question about rocket science. The answer is still, "Because UUIDv4 is still a better way to do it." The UUID standard solves the second and third tier problems and knock-on effects you don't think about until you've run a system for awhile, or until you start adding multiple information systems that need to interact with the same data.

But, using UUIDv4 shouldn't be rocket science, either. UUID support should be built in to a language intended for web applications, database applications, or business applications. That's why you're using Go or C# instead of C. And Go is somewhat focused on micro-service architectures. It's going to need to serialize and deserialize objects regularly.

How's your UUIDv4 generated?

> Are you sure the way you're serializing it is how the remote system will deserialize it?

It's 16 bytes. There's no serialization.

> There's no serialization.

Hex encoding with hyphens in the right spot isn't serialization?

What do they look like when I put it in a url?

Use whatever encoding you want? Base64 is probably one of the most practical, but you're not obligated to use that.

UUIDs don't use base64

Vibe endian

You are really making it seem like a huge problem. Generate random bytes, serialize to a string and store in a db. Done

A downvote tells me nothing. Please tell me what I'm missing, maybe I could learn something

You have to generate random bytes with sufficient entropy to avoid collisions and you have to have a consistent way to serialize it to a string. There's already a standard for this, it's called UUID.

> serialize to a string and store in a db

Ah, here we are. If it's just bytes, why store it as a string? Sixteen bytes is just a 128-bit integer, don't waste the space. So now the DB needs to know how to convert your string back to an integer. And back to a string when you ask for it.

"Well why not just keep it as an integer?"

Sure, in which base? With leading zeroes as padding?

But now you also need to handle this in JavaScript, where you have to know to deserialize it to a Bigint or Buffer (or Uint8Array).

UUIDs just mean you don't need to do any of this crap yourself. It's already there and it already works. Everything everywhere speaks the same UUIDs.

It's not a huge problem. Uuid adds convenience over reinventing that wheel everywhere. And some of those wheels would use the wrong random or hash or encoding.

(Downvote wasn't me)

Have you considered using two uuids for more randomness

I believe current official guidance if you want a lot of random data is to use v8, the "user-defined" UUID. The use of v4 is strictly less flexible here.

No, UUIDv8 offers 122 bits for vendor specific or experimental use cases. If you fill those bits randomly, you get the same amount of randomness as a v4. The spec is explicit that it does not replace v4 for random data use case.

> To be clear, UUIDv8 is not a replacement for UUIDv4 (Section 5.4) where all 122 extra bits are filled with random data.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9562.html#section-5.8-2

Yes, vendor-specific data can be 100% random.

It can be, but you should prefer UUIDv4 if you do that. One problem is that UUIDv8 does not promise uniqueness.

> UUIDv8's uniqueness will be implementation specific and MUST NOT be assumed.

Here's a spec compliant UUIDv8 implementation I made that doesn't produce unique IDs: https://github.com/robalexdev/uuidv8-xkcd-221

So, given a spec-compliant UUIDv4 you can assume it is unique, but you'd need out-of-band information to make the same assumption about a UUIDv8.

I wrote much more in a blog post: https://alexsci.com/blog/uuid-oops/

Really? Doesn’t v4 locally make the inserts into the B-Tree pretty messy? I was taught to use v7 because it allows writes to be a lot faster due to memory efficient paging by the kernel (something you lose with v4 because the page of a subsequent write is entirely random).

https://www.thenile.dev/blog/uuidv7#why-uuidv7 has some details: " UUID versions that are not time ordered, such as UUIDv4 (described in Section 5.4), have poor database-index locality. This means that new values created in succession are not close to each other in the index; thus, they require inserts to be performed at random locations. The resulting negative performance effects on the common structures used for this (B-tree and its variants) can be dramatic. ".

Also mentioned on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323008

In more practical terms:-

1. Users - your users table may not benefit by being ordered by created_at ( or uuid7 ) index because whether or not you need to query that data is tied to the users activity rather than when they first on-boarded.

2 Orders - The majority of your queries on recent orders or historical reporting type query which should benefit for a created_at ( or uuidv7 ) index.

Obviously the argument is then you're leaking data in the key, but my personal take is this is over stated. You might not want to tell people how old a User is, but you're pretty much always going to tell them how old an Order is.

It's memory and disk paging both.

There's also a hot spot problem with databases. That's the performance problem with autoincrement integers. If you are always writing to the same page on disk, then every write has to lock the same page.

Uuidv7 is a trade off between a messy b-tree (page splits) and a write page hot spot (latch contention). It's always on the right side of the b-tree, but it's spread out more to avoid hot spots.

That still doesn't mean you should always use v7. It does reversibly encode a timestamp, and it could be used to determine the rate that ids are generated (analogous to the German tank problem). If the uuidv7 is monotonic, then it's worse for this issue.

In distributed databases I've worked with, there's usually something like a B-tree per key range, but there can be thousands of key ranges distributed over all the nodes in the cluster in parallel, each handling modifications in a LSM. The goal there is to distribute the storage and processing over all nodes equally, and that's why predictable/clustered IDs fail to do so well. That's different to the Postgres/MySQL scenario where you have one large B-tree per index.

v7 exposes creation date, and maybe you don't want that. So, depends on use-case

I think I read something once about using v7 internally and exposing v4 in your API.

Or even an autoincrement int primary key internally. Depending on your scale and env etc, but still fits enough use cases.

[flagged]

A slow day in Go-news land? :)

It is heathwarming to see such mundane small tech bit making front page of HN when elsewhere is is debated whether programming as profession is dead or more broadly if AI will be enslaving humanity in the next decade. :)

I'm seeing deep technical stuff after months, so I'm happy!

It’s nice to have a break from AI FUD. It reminds me of a time when I could browse HN without getting anxiety immediately, because nowadays you can’t open a comment section without finding a comment about how you ngmi.

Well fortunately you’re here to take what was a discussion completely unrelated to AI and drag it back around to AI again.

If you’re tired of talking about AI, why did you post this?

Man... I spent the last 6 months writing code using voice chat with multiple concurrent Claude code agents using an orchestration system because I felt like that was the new required skill set.

In the past few weeks I've started opening neovim again and just writing code. It's still 50/50 with a Claude code instance, but fuck I don't feel a big productivity difference.

I just write my own code and then ask AI to find any issues and correct them if I feel it is good advice. What AI is amazing at is writing most of my test cases. Saves me a lot of time.

I've seen tests doing:

a = 1

assert a == 1

// many lines here where a is never used

assert a == 1

Yes AI test cases are awesome until you read what it's doing.

To be fair, many human tests I've read do similar.

Especially when folks are trying to push % based test metrics and have types ( and thus they tests assert types where the types can't really be wrong ).

I use AI to write tests. Many of them the e2e fell into the pointless niche, but I was able to scope my API tests well enough to get very high hit rate.

The value of said API tests aren't unlimited. If I had to hand roll them, I'm not sure I would have written as many, but they test a multitude of 400, 401, 402, 403, and 404s, and the tests themselves have absolutely caught issues such as validator not mounting correctly, or the wrong error status code due to check ordering.

It's good at writing/updating tedious test cases and fixtures when you're directing it more closely. But yes, it's not as great at coming up with what to test in the first place.

I write assert(a==1) right before the line where a is assumed to be 1 (to skip a division by a) even if I know it's 1. Especially if I know it's 1!

Yep. Especially for tests with mock data covering all sorts of extreme edge cases.

Don't use AI for that, it doesn't know what your real data looks like.

lol. okay. neither do you.

Majority of data in typical message-passing plumbing code are a combination of opaque IDs, nominal strings, few enums, and floats. It's mostly OK for these cases, I have found. Esp. in typed languages.

There has always been a difference on modality and substance.

This is the same thing as picking a new smart programming language or package, or insisting that Dvorak layout is the only real way forward.

Personally I try to put as much distance to the modality discussion and get intimate with the substance.

> voice chat ... required skill set

But we're still required to go to the office, and talking to a computer on the open space is highly unwelcome

Right. If AI actually made you more productive, there would be more good software around, and we wouldn't have the METR study showing it makes you 20% slower.

AI delivers the feeling of productivity and the ability to make endless PoCs. For some tasks it's actually good, of course, but writing high quality software by itself isn't one.

Ah, yes. LLM-assisted development. That thing that is not at all changing, that thing that different people aren’t doing differently, and that thing that some people aren’t definitely way better at than others. I swear that some supposedly “smart” people on this website throw their ability to think critically out the window when they want to weigh in on the AI culture war. B-but the study!

I can way with certainty that: 1. LLM-assisted development has gotten significantly, materially better in the past 12 months.

2. I would be incredibly skeptical of any study that’s been designed, executed, analysed, written about, published, snd talked about here, within that period of time.

This is the equivalent of a news headline stating with “science says…”.

Nobody is interested in your piece of anecdata and asserting that something has gotten better without doing any studies on it, is the exact opposite of critical thinking.

You are displaying the exact same thing that you were complaining about.

Really? The past two weeks I've been writing code with AI and feel a massive productivity difference, I ended up with 22k loc, which is probably around as many I'd have manually written for the featureset at hand, except it would have taken me months.

My work involves fixing/adding stuff in legacy systems. Most of the solutions AI comes up with are horrible. I've reverted back to putting problems on my whiteboard and just letting it percolate. I still let AI write most of the code once I know what I want. But I've stopped delegating any decision making to it.

Ah, yeah, I can see that. It's not as good with legacy systems, I've found.

Well at least for what I do, success depends on having lots of unit tests to lean on, regardless of whether it is new or existing code. AI plus a hallucination-free feedback loop has been a huge productivity boost for me, personally. Plus it’s an incentive to make lots of good tests (which AI is also good at)

A lot of people‘s business model is to to capitalize on LLM anxiety to sell their PUA-tier courses.

Its a small tech bit but a big architecture / management decision.

Basically, who runs golang?

The perfectionists are correct, UUIDs are awful and if there's a pile of standards that all have small problems the best thing you can do is make a totally new standard to add to the already too long list.

The in-the-trenches system software devs want this BAD. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#... They want a library that flawlessly interops with everything on that list, ideally. Something you can trust and will not deprecate a function you need for live code and it just works. I admit a certain affinity to this perspective.

The cryptobros want to wait, there is some temporary current turmoil in UUID land. Not like "drama" but things are in flux and it would be horrible for golang to be stuck permanently supporting forever some interim thing that officially gets dropped (or worse, under scrutiny has a security hole or something, but for reverse compatibility with older/present golang would need permanent-ish reverse compatibility) Can't we just wait until 2027 or so? This is not the ideal time to set UUID policy in concrete. Just wait a couple more months or a year or two? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9562

I think I covered the three groups that are fighting pretty accurately and at least semi fairly, I did make fun of the perfectionists a little but cut me a break everyone makes fun of those guys.

So, yeah, a "small technical bit" but its actually a super huge architectural / leadership / management decision.

I hope they get it correct, I love golang and have a side thing with tinygo. If you're doing something with microcontrollers that doesn't use networking and you're not locked in to a framework/rtos, just use tinygo its SO cool. Its just fun. I with tinygo had any or decent networking. Why would I need zephyr if I have go routines? Hmm.

I've been around the block a few times with UUID-alike situations and the worst thing they could decide is to swing to an extreme. They'll probably be OK this is not golangs first time around the block either.

It'll probably be OK. I hope.

Here we see Go haters in their natural habitat, the HN comment section.

Watch as they stand at the watering hole, bored and listless. A sad look on their faces, knowing that now that Go has generics, all their joy has left their life. Like the dog that caught his tail, they are confused.

One looks at his friends as if to say, "Now what?"

Suddenly there is a noise.

All heads turn as they see the HN post about UUIDs.

One of the members pounces on it. "Why debate this when the entire industry is collapsing?"

No reply. Silence.

His peers give a half-hearted smile, as if to say, "Thanks for trying" but the truth is apparent. The joy of hating on programming languages is nil when AI is the only thing looking at code any more.

The Go hater returns to the waterhole. Defeated.

I think you're massively misreading the tone of the comment you're relying to

One thing I love about Go, not fancy-latest-hype features, until the language collapses or every upgrade becomes a nightmare, just adding useful stuff and getting out of the way.

I know, I recently upgraded and skipped several releases without any issues with some large codebases.

The compatability guarantee is a massive win, so exciting to have a boring language to build on that doesn’t change much but just gradually gets better.

Really? My experience is that of C, C++, Go, Python, and Rust, Go BY FAR breaks code most often. (except the Python 2->3 change)

Sure, most of that is not the compiler or standard library, but dependencies. But I'm not talking random opensource library (I can't blame the core for that), but things like protobuf breaking EVERY TIME. Or x/net, x/crypto, or whatever.

But also yes, from random dependencies. It seems that language-culturally, Go authors are fine with breaking changes. Whereas I don't see that with people making Rust crates. And multiple times I've dug out C++ projects that I have not touched in 25 years, and they just work.

The stdlib has been very very stable since the first release - I still use some code from Go 1.0 days which has not evolved much.

The x/ packages are more unstable yes, that's why they're outside stdlib, though I haven't personally noticed any breakage and have never been bitten by this. What breakage did you see?

I think protobuf is notorious for breaking (but more from user changes). I don't use it I'm afraid so have no opinion on that, though it has gone through some major revisions so perhaps that's what you mean?

I don't tend to use much third party code apart from the standard library and some x libraries (most libraries are internal to the org), I'm sure if you do have a lot of external dependencies you might have a different experience.

Well, for C++ the backwards compatability is even better. Unless you're using `gets()` or `auto_ptr`, old C++ code either just continue to compile perfectly, or was always broken.

Sure, the Go standard library is in some sense bigger, so it's nice of them to not break that. But short of a Python2->3 or Perl5->6 migration, isn't that just table stakes for a language?

The only good thing about Go is that its standard library has enough coverage to do a reasonable number of things. The only good thing. But any time you need to step outside of that, it starts a bit-rotting timer that ticks very quickly.

> though [protobuf] has gone through some major revisions so perhaps that's what you mean?

No, it seems it's broken way more often than that, requiring manual changes.

But any time you need to step outside of that, it starts a bit-rotting timer that ticks very quickly.

This is not my experience with my own or third party code. I can't remember any regressions I experienced caused by code changes to the large stdlib at all in the last decade, and perhaps one caused by changes to a third party library (sendgrid, who changed their API with breaking changes, not really a Go problem).

A 'bit-rotting timer' isn't very specific or convincing, do you have examples in mind?

Isn't the x for experimental and therefore breaking API changes are expected?

Odd to me that the focus seems to be on the inactivity of Google's package when https://github.com/gofrs/uuid not only conforms to the newer standard but is actively maintained.

I get a kick out of publishing libs with no external deps. Regardless of reasoning, this change makes that easier.

especially when they don't depend on libc.

While the uuid package is actively maintained, it hasn't had a release since 2024. Indeed, there's an open issue from June 2025 asking about it: https://github.com/google/uuid/issues/194

The RFC isn’t changing, is it?

I’m not sure of the state of that particular library, but yes, the RFC has changed significantly. For instance, the UUIDv7 format changed from the earlier draft RFC resulting in incompatibilities.

This is an example of an unmaintained UUID library in a similar situation that is currently causing incompatibilities because they implemented the draft spec. and didn’t update when the RFC changed:

https://github.com/stevesimmons/uuid7/issues/1

Any Python developer using the uuid7 library is getting something that is incompatible with the UUIDv7 specification and other UUIDv7 implementations as a result. Developers who use the stdlib uuid package in Python 3.14+ and uuid7 as a fallback in older versions are getting different, incompatible behaviour depending upon which version of Python they are running.

This can manifest itself as a developer using UUIDv7 for its time-ordered property, deploying with Python <=3.13, upgrading to Python 3.14+ and discovering that all their data created with Python 3.13 sorts incorrectly when mixed with data created with Python 3.14+.

A UUID library that is not receiving updates is quite possibly badly broken and definitely warrants suspicion and closer inspection.

Alternative take: don't put draft RFCs into prod

It hasn’t been a draft RFC for a couple of years:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9562/

The problem is not that it is a draft RFC, the problem is that the library is unmaintained with an unresponsive developer who is squatting the uuid7 package name. It’s the top hit for Python developers who want to use UUIDv7 for Python 3.13 and below.

The problem here is a lack of namespaces. A problem the cargo bozos decided to duplicate

Your point is completely invalidated by useless name calling. The people behind cargo are clearly accomplished and serious individuals, and even if you disagree with some of the choices, calling them bozos makes your whole argument unconvincing.

RFC changes aside, the go community has been bit by unmaintained UUID libraries with security issues. Consider https://github.com/satori/go.uuid/issues/123 as a popular example.

The open issue in Google's repo about the package being malicious is not a good look. The community concluded it's a false positive. If the repo was maintained they'd confirm this and close the issue.

Maintaince is much more than RFC compliance, although the project hasn't met that bar either.

There have been committed 3 new features and a seemingly significant bug fix since the last release: https://github.com/google/uuid/compare/v1.6.0...HEAD

If the library just existed as a correct implementation of the RFC without bugs or significant missing features, that would be one thing. But leaving features and bug fixes already committed to the repository unreleased for years because the maintainer hasn't cut a new release since 2024 is a bad sign.

The proposal is 3 years old

That's great, but I abhor UUID's.

I see them crop up everywhere. IMO, they are decidedly human-unfriendly - particularly to programmers and database admins trying to debug issues. Too many digits to deal with, and they suck up too much column width in query results, spreadsheets, reports, etc.

I'm not saying they don't have a place (e.g. when you have a genuine need to generate unique identifiers across completely disconnected locations, and the id's will generally never need to be dealt with by a human). But in practice they've been abused to do everything under the sun (filenames, URL links, user id's, transaction numbers, database primary keys, etc). I almost want to start a website with a gallery of all the examples where they've been unsuitably shoehorned in when just a little more consideration would have produced something more humane.

For most common purposes, a conventional, centralized dispenser is better. Akin to the Take-A-Number reels you see at the deli. Deterministic randomization is a thing if you don't want the numbers to count sequentially. Prefixes, or sharding the ID space, is also a thing, if you need uniqueness across different latency boundaries (like disparate datacenters or siloed servers).

I've lost count of how many times I've seen a UUID generated when what the designer really should have done is just grab the primary key (or when that's awkward, the result of a GetNextId stored procedure) from their database.

At a prior job, there was an internal project code system for tracking billable hours or people assignment kind of thing. Everyone knew the codes of their projects. It was a six digit code, two letters and then four numbers: giving you some ~7 million point space. Company was ~100 years old and only had some 15k codes recorded in all history. The list of codes was manually updated once a quarter by an admin who might add another ten at a time.

Some chuckle head decided to replace the system with UUIDs. Now, they are no longer human memorable/readable/writable on paper/anything useful. Even better, they must have used some home grown implementation, because the codes were weirdly sequential. If you ever had to look at a dump of codes, the ids are almost identical minus a digit somewhere in the middle.

Destructive change that ruined a perfectly functional system.

People should really just use integers.

It's funny how fast it is to just implement a counter and how much people rely on UUIDs to avoid it. If you already use postgres somewhere, just create a "counter" table for your namespace. You can easily count 10K-100k values per second or faster, with room to grow if you outscale that.

What do you get? The most efficient, compressible little integers you could ever want. You unlock data structures like roaring bitmaps/ treemaps. You cut memory to 25% depending on your cardinality (ie: you can use u16 or u32 in memory sometimes). You get insane compression benefits where you can get rows of these integers to take a few bits of data each after compression. You get faster hashmap lookups. It's just insane how this compounds into crazy downstream wins.

It is absolutely insane how little cost it is to do this and how many optimizations you unlock. But people somehow think that id generation will be their bottleneck, or maybe it's just easier to avoid a DB sometimes, or whatever, and so we see UUIDs everywhere. Although, agreed that most of the time you can just generate the unique id for data yourself.

In fairness, UUID is easier, but damn it wrecks performance.

I just wish there was some human element to them so they were easier to talk about. Something like:

BASKETBALL-9a176cbe-7655-4850-9e7f-b98c4b3b4704-FISH

CAKE-3a01d58f-59d3-4b0c-87dc-4152c816f442-POTATO

“Which row was it, ‘basketball fish’ or ‘cake potato’?

Of course, the words would need to be a checksum. As soon as you introduce them, nobody is looking at the hex again. Which is an improvement, since nobody is looking at all the hex now “it’s the one ending in ‘4ab’”.

There's nothing stopping you from doing so. You don't have to use strict UUIDs. Their form rarely serves a real purpose anyway.

But for exposed values (document ids, customer ids, that kind of thing), it can be awkward if a patient's id is suddenly "CRANKY-...-FART".

If I discovered that were my patient ID, I would laugh myself into unconsciousness and buy the staff a pizza.

At $dayJob we use (user facing) IDs like this. Select a prefix then add a sufficient number of random alphanumeric characters for your use case.

There's been a lot of historical work done in the past and I used NIST FIPS181 to implement this.

Note: FIPS181 was intended for passwords and I was using them as handy short human-readable record IDs as per your post. You probably shouldn't use FIPS181 for passwords in 2026 LOL.

Describing FIPS181 as pronounceable is optimistic. However its better than random text wrt human conversations. They start looking like mysterious assembly language mnemonics after awhile.

> Deterministic randomization is a thing if you don't want the numbers to count sequentially.

What are your favorite ways to approach this?

I think a maximal period linear feedback shift register might fit well.

Based on the conversation, is it actually coming?

It's currently listed as a 'Likely accept' https://github.com/orgs/golang/projects/17/views/1

Generally means it'll be going in unless something new comes up which alters people's thinking.

Yes

Golang lack of support for basic stuff like this is quite annoying.

What's the language you're thinking of that has more of these decisions fixed in the standard library? I know it's not Ruby, Python, Rust, or Javascript. Is it Java? I don't think this is something Elixir does better.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but the linked issue seems to address this directly:

> Would like to point out how Go is rather the exception than the norm with regards to including UUID support in its standard library.

> C#: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.guid.new...

> Java: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/UUID.htm...

> JavaScript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Crypto/rand...

> Python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/uuid.html

> Ruby: https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/securerandom/rdoc/S...

You're answering the question of "which languages have UUIDs in their standard libraries" (Javascript is not one of them). That's not the question I'm asking. If you wrote a new Python program today that needed to make HTTP requests, would you rely on the stdlib, or would you pull in a dep? In a Java program, if you were encrypting files or blobs, stdlib or dep?

Is C# the language that gives the Go stdlib a run for its money? I haven't used it much. JS, Python, and Ruby, I have, quite a bit, and I have the sprawling requirements.txts and Gemfiles to prove it.

I asked the question I did upthread because, while there are a lot of colorable arguments about what Go did wrong, a complete and practical standard library where the standard library's functionality is the idiomatic answer to the problems it addresses is one of the things Go happens to do distinctively well. Which makes dunking on it for this UUID thing kind of odd.

> If you wrote a new Python program today that needed to make HTTP requests, would you rely on the stdlib, or would you pull in a dep?

For a short script, the standard "urllib.request" module [0] works pretty well, and is usually my first choice since it's always installed. For a larger program, I'll usually use a third-party module with more features/async support though, but I'll only do this if I'm using other third-party dependencies anyways.

> JS, Python, and Ruby, I have, quite a bit, and I have the sprawling requirements.txts and Gemfiles to prove it.

I checked the top 10 Go repositories on GitHub [1], and all but 1 of them have 30+ direct dependencies listed in their "go.mod" files (and many more indirect ones). Also, both C and JavaScript are well-known for their terrible standard libraries, yet out of all languages, JavaScript programs tend to use the most dependencies, while C programs tend to use the least. So I don't think that the number of dependencies that an average program in a given language uses says anything about the quality of that language's standard library.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html

[1]: https://github.com/trending/go?since=monthly

Just claiming you'd use urllib is a concession. Yeah, I get it: for toy programs, you'd use the stdlib's HTTP.

That's not what happens in Golang.

Fair enough, but the quality/breadth of the standard libraries is fairly topic-specific in Go (and all languages, really). There's a reason that you picked networking and crypto for your examples, since the Go standard library is indeed really strong here—I don't even like Go, but if I had to write a program that did lots of cryptography and networking, then Go would probably be my first choice.

But lots of programs (and most of the programs that I write) don't use any cryptography, and only have trivial networking requirements, and outside those areas, I'd argue that the Python standard library [0] has broader coverage, supports more features, and is better documented than the Go standard library [1].

The Go standard library is still pretty great though, and is well ahead of most other languages; I just personally think that it's a little worse than Python's. But if you mostly write networking/crypto code, I can easily see how you'd have the opposite opinion.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/std

Like, at this point, I feel like we share premises. We disagree, but, fine, seems like a reasonable disagreement. A better one than how annoying it is that Golang lacks "basic stuff" like a standard UUID interface.

Or a GUI framework

[flagged]

I gave that example to refute the point that having worked on projects in other languages with tons of third-party dependencies implies that those languages have poor standard libraries. I certainly didn't intend to imply that that means that Go has a poor standard library or that small Go projects often use hundreds of third-party dependencies like JavaScript projects tend to do.

Go's package management is actually one of its strongest points, so I think that it's unsurprising/good that some projects have lots of dependencies. But I still stand by the point that you shouldn't judge a language based on how many dependencies most programs written in it use.

(Except for JavaScript, where I have no problem judging it by the npm craziness :) )

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Crypto/rand...

Ruby has SecureRandom.uuid and others

No one is debating whether Go is missing a uuid package from its standard library; the debate is about whether this is indicative of a general trend with the Go standard library (as the gp claimed above).

If you’re arguing as the grandparent did that Go regularly omits important packages from its standard library, then it’s not unreasonable to ask you for your idea of an exemplary stdlib.

My first, and primary, programming language was C# which includes probably too large a standard library. It was definitely a surprise to see how minimal/simple other standard libraries are!

Like Python though, while the batteries are included, many of them are dead.

It begs the question, why don't these languages put out a v2 stdlib?

Python has some work to trim bits of it's built in libraries, see for example https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/ and https://docs.python.org/3/deprecations/index.html .

Broadly speaking, maintaining a big std lib is a huge amount of work, so it makes sense that a language team is conservative about adding new surface to a stb lib which they will then have to maintain for a long time.

Why it is "huge amount of work" ? Do the code reliably breaks in every new python version ?

The work involved in maintaining a standard library is things like bug fixes. A larger standard library (or multi versions) means there's more likely to be bugs. You also have performance improvements, and when new versions of the language come out which has features to improve performance, you will most likely want to go back through and refactor some code to take advantage of it. You will also want to go through and refactor to make code easier to maintain. All of this just gets harder with a larger surface.

And the more stuff you pack into the standard library the more expertise you need on the maintenance team for all these new libraries. And you don't want a standard library that is bad, because then people won't use it. And then you're stuck with the maintenance burden of code that no one uses. It's a big commitment to add something to a standard library.

So it's not that things just suddenly break.

Every library is a liability especially in terms of api. There are many example where the first take on a problem within a std lib was a bad choice and required a major overhaul. Once something is in standard library it’s literally impossible to take it back without breaking the world if you don’t control api consumers

Yes, in python they break something at every release now. It's terrible. It mostly is because they remove modules from their standard library for no good reasons.

For example they've removed asyncore, their original loop-based module before the async/await syntax existed. All the software from that era needs a total rewrite. Luckily in debian for now the module is provided as a .deb package so I didn't have to do the total rewrite.

edit: as usual on ycombinator, dowvotes for saying something factually true that can be easily verified :D

I think the downvotes are because you did not answer the question you replied to, and instead gave a pretty unrelated rant.

I'm explaining that yes, code does break every new python version? Mostly because they touch the stdlib instead of just leaving it be.

The thread is about the code in the std lib being a huge amount of work because the code in the std lib needs to be kept working with new language releases.

And then you answered about downstream code breakage totally outside the std lib.

What would that entail, just a package whitelist? A few renamed packages? In the python 3 transition they renamed urllib2 to just urllib, but now it's almost a dead battery too and you want to use requests.

Python had enough fun with 2 to 3 transition I think.

Honestly the problem was they did not go far enough. They hoped to have a minimal churn switch to avoid getting locked into bikeshedding for the rest of time. However, there was so little user user facing improvements that the required change hardly seemed worth porting. They also failed to initially offer any automatic porting tooling which could have increased adoption.

I will be forever mad that they did not use that as a breaking opportunity to namespace the standard library. Something like: `import std.io` so that other libraries can never conflict.

Yes because the formats and protocols they are for have changed so much right? -_-'

Yes, and surrounding expectations like async. Urllib doesn't pool connections.

Obviously PHP

the idea of what 'batteries included' means has changed a lot in the past twenty years, and like most Go quirks , probably Google just didn't need <missing-things>.

Huh? The universal idiomatic answer to "how to use UUIDs in Go programs" for the past decade has been to pull in a Google dep.

Google is the author of the de facto uuid library in Go, google/uuid. I’m very curious what people think is an exemplary “batteries included” stdlib?

UUID is just array of 16 bytes or two 64-bit ints. Generating UUIDv4 is like few lines of code. Is that a big deal? I don't think so.

16 random bytes is not a valid UUIDv4. I don’t think it needs to be in the standard library, but implementing the spec yourself is also not the right choice for 99% of cases.

Well that depends on your luck, it could be a valid one about 1/16th of the time.

1/64, actually, because RFC-compliant (variant 1) UUIDv4 requires fixed values for both the version nibble and two bits of the variant nibble.

The fact that we're discussing this at all is a reasonable argument for using a library function.

While it might be invalid, will most libraries choke if you give them a pseudo UUIDv4?

Nice, thanks and I agree.

I didn't say about 16 random bytes. But you're almost there. You generate 16 random bytes and perform few bitwise operations to set version and variant bits correctly.

Not that it matters. I don't even think that there's a single piece of software in the world which would actually care about these bits rather than treating the whole byte array as opaque thing.

Let's call it a valid UUIDv0 - all bits randomized including the version bits :)

What if I generate 16 random bytes and use that as id?

No problem, just don't call it UUID

I think it saves labor and eventual bug hunting to include these in a stdlib. We should not be expected to look up the UUIDv4 spec and make sure you’re following it correctly. This feels like exactly what reasonable encapsulation should be.

I had a similar thought a while back. Looking at the code for existing UUID projects, issues they fixed, and in some cases the CVEs, is a good way to form a different opinion.

You can say this for everything that has built-in support.

Some things are actually hard to implement. I'd spent a lot of time trying to implement concurrent hashmap, for example. UUID is not one of these things.

What stuff do you have in mind?

I was disappointed by Go's poor support for human-focused logging. The log module is so basic that one might as well just use Printf. The slog module technically offers a line-based handler, but getting a traditional format out of it is painful at best, it lacks features that are common elsewhere, and it's somehow significantly slower than the json handler. I can only guess that it was added as an afterthought, by someone who doesn't normally do that kind of logging.

To be fair, I suppose this might make sense if Go is intended only for enterprisey environments. I often do projects outside of those environments, though, so I ended up spending a lot of time on a side quest to build what I expected to be built-in.

I haven't explored enough of the stdlib yet to know what else that I might expect is not there. If you have a wish list, would you care to share it?

Go has one of the best stdlibs of any language. I'd go as far and say it's the #1 language where the stdlib is the most used for day to day programming. cut the bullshit

Open the python documentation if you're curious of why people are downvoting you.

I cannot identify with this at all. We have Python and Go applications in production, and for Go the vibe is mostly "standard library plus a few dependencies" (e.g. SQL driver, opentelemetry) whereas with Python it's mostly "we need a dozen libraries just to get something done".

For example Go has production ready HTTP server and client implementations in the standard library. But with Python, you have to use FastAPI or Flask, and requests or httpx. For SQL there's SQLAlchemy I guess and probably some other alternatives (my Python knowledge is not that great), whereas again with Go the abstraction is just in the standard library and you only include the driver for the specific database.

We use Renovate to manage dependency upgrades. It runs once a week. Every Python project has a handful or more dependency upgrades waiting every week, primarily due to the huge amount of dependencies and transitive dependencies in each project. The Go projects sometimes have one or two, but most of the time they're silent because there is nothing to upgrade (partly due to just having so few dependencies to begin with).

I don't buy this for one moment. Python and breaking changes are lovers. Nobody I have ever worked with builds or tries to build stdlib python. Most Go devs to pride themselves on minimal dependencies.

Honestly, I don't understand what you wrote so I cannot reply.

It makes you look on GitHub for implementations, which later can be hijacked and used for malicious reasons

What other basic stuff are you thinking of?

I'd love to see proper WebSocket support, and JWTs.

Now do Javascript.

crypto.randomUUID()?

https://github.com/rs/xid

Wonder about the opinion of the maintainers of the Google package. Will they put it on maintenance mode or continue developing it like usual?

Kotlin also added RFC 9562 (which includes the new UUID versions) support to the standard library in version 2.3 recently. It's a multi platform implementation too so it works on native, wasm, jvm and js. I think it makes a lot of sense to default to that now that the IETF RFC has been out for a few years.

So, it makes sense for Go to introduce support for this as well.

Is there a way to have benefits of both? Version 7 for better database clustering. And version 4 for complete randomness? So users can not inference nothing from the id? I have an idea: Use version 7 internally, then scramble it before sending to the user. Scrambling could be done by the database or by the server application. It could be as simple as XOR with some 128bit constant, or as resilient as AES encryption. Of course you also need to do unscrambling of IDs coming from users.

Others agree. Check out uuidv47

https://github.com/stateless-me/uuidv47

If privacy is the main concern (as it is in most usage of UUIDs) you could just encrypt the integer primary key instead with something like feistel and avoid the performance problems of UUIDs while still having opaque public identifiers.

Cool! I love go and things like this will keep bringing me back :)

Every time I've implemented UUID's it's for a database and something like PostgreSQL would handle it. Still glad to see this feature being worked on, I would have utilized a random string generator instead of the full battle tested UUID specification.

Seems pointless. Go should focus on refactoring core libraries, especially net and http, for performance because nbio, gnet and others are kicking its ass. And that is sad, as third party libraries should never perform better than standard library.

Also swiss tables were great addition to Go's native maps, but then again there are faster libraries that can give you 3x performance(in case of numeric keys).

From nbio's README:

  For regular connection scenarios, nbio's performance is inferior to the standard library due to goroutine affinity, lower buffer reuse rate for individual connections, and variable escape issues.

  gnet and net don't share the same philosophy in network programming. Thus, building network applications with gnet can be significantly different from building them with net, and the philosophies can't be reconciled.
  [...]
  gnet is not designed to displace the Go net, but to create an alternative in the Go ecosystem for building performance-critical network services.

However, the net/http package is a different story. It indeed isn't very performant, though one should be careful to understand that that assessment is on relative terms; net/http still runs circles around some other languages' standard approaches to HTTP servers.

A big part of why net/http is relatively slow is also down to its goals and API surface. It's designed to be easy to use, not especially fast. By comparison, there's fasthttp [1], which lives up to its name, but is much harder to work with properly. The goal of chasing performance at all costs also leads to questionable design decisions, like fiber [2], based on fasthttp, which achieves some of its performance by violating Go's runtime guarantee that strings are immutable. That is a wild choice that the standard library authors would/could never make.

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/valyala/fasthttp

[2]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gofiber/fiber/v3

STD is built on goroutines whereas these performance networking libraries are built on a main reactor loop. Hence the need for refactoring, not just tweaking.

Something like http/v2 and net/v2. I know gnet had(has?) issues wit implementing tls because how the entire STD is designed to work. At the time, it was a great piece of software, but by now, it is slow and outdated. A lot of progress has been made since in networking, parsing, serialization, atomics and so on.

Go is often the best part of my work day.

what a bunch of drama in the comments.

It’s kind of ridiculous to argue against UUID being part of the standard package for a language largely aimed at servers. At that point why even have any crypto functions or any of the bigger stuff it already has if the argument is 3rd party libs are enough?

UUIDv7 didn't mature until long after the Go standard library was mostly settled. By that point, there was already an idiomatic 3p dep for UUIDs (the Google package), and as you can see from the thread, there were arguments in favor of keeping it 3p (it can be updated on an arbitrary cadence, unlike the stdlib).

They could have implemented the other types of uuid generation, as well as having the standard type. Then evolve.

UUIDs rarely get new versions. I don’t think it’d be too much to expect Go to stay relatively current on that.

People are weird. A few days ago someone on /r/Java was arguing that a basic JSON parser shouldn’t be in the standard library.

Anecdote: about 8 years ago, I was interviewing hundreds of candidates for a non-java shop but you could interview in java if desired. One java dev ever was able to figure out parsing json with ease. Every single other java interview the person struggled with json. It was weird.

You mean he could read it or he could write a parser or he could use a dependency?

Use a dependency. It was a wild pattern that still confuses me years later.

Literal interview: concurrently hit these endpoints that returns json and sum the total of values returned. Handle any 400 or 500 level http errors.

Literal former Googlers and flubbing the interview. They would spend too much time setting up an IDE and project, not be sure how to handle errors, and unable to parse the json. We eventually added a skeleton java project and removed json from the api, allowing text only responses. I learned java people don't set up projects or deal with json. It is the only explanation

"Former Googlers" were probably used to using protobuf so they could get from a function call straight out to a struct of the right schema. It's one level of abstraction higher and near-universal in Google, especially in internal-to-internal communication edges.

I don't think it's a strong hiring signal if they weren't already familiar with APIs for (de)serialization in between, because if they're worth anything then they'll just pick that up from documentation and be done with it.

The question evaluates different skills when you solve it in Java. If you allowed XML, you'd see Java candidates reach for the standard library, as it has a built-in XML parser. Using plain text responses was a good fix, as the candidate can focus on concurrency, networking, and error handling, which is probably what you were trying to assess.

In my experience it’s Googler’s not Java people. All of my friends at Google tell me how everything is already set up for them.

You mention it was 8 years ago, at that point a typical Java dev would be already using Spring Boot for requests and deserializing JSON to POJOs (with Jackson under the hood).

Adding UUID to the standard library is defensible for a server-focused language, but making it part of the stdlib binds maintainers to long-term compatibility and support, so the debate should focus on API surface and long term maintenance rather than whether third-party packages exist.

If added, keep the scope small: implement RFC 4122 v4 generation using crypto/rand.Read with correct version and variant bit handling, provide Parse and String, MarshalText and UnmarshalText, JSON Marshal and Unmarshal hooks, and database/sql Scanner and Valuer, and skip v1 MAC and time based generation by default because of privacy and cross-platform headaches.

I would really urge everyone to actually engage in the arguments people are making.

Go’s core design philosophy is stability. This means backwards compatibility forever. But really, even more than that. The community is largely against “v2” libraries. After the first version is introduced, Go devs trend towards stability, live with its flaws, and are super hesitant to fix things with a “v2”.

There have been exceptions. After 20 years of the frankly horrible json library, a v2 one is in the works.

Most of the uuid concerns come from a place of concern. After the api is added to the standard library, it will be the canonical api forever.

There are surely pros and cons to this design philosophy. I just don’t understand why people who disagree with Go’s core goals don’t just use a different language? Sorry to take a jab here, but are we really short on programming languages that introduce the wrong v1 api, so then the language ends up with codebases that depend on v1, v2, and v3? (Looking at you Java, Python, and C#)

https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed#the-bikshed-email

Basically one guy having a fit when people disagreed with him.

It would appear that person and OP are one in the same.

Damn. I missed that. But yeah OP didn't take it well when people poked hole into his proposed API.

But regardless of API ergonomics, I would love to have UUID v4 and v7 in the stdlib.

maybe the OP is trying but failing to drum up support for his unergonomic api proposal

Welcome to literally any Go thread.

Am I the only one who hates UUIDs and doesn't see the point of them?

Having any structure whatsoever in them is pointless and stupid. UUIDs should be 128 buts of crypto.Rand() and nothing else.

Argh.

UUIDs are recognizable, have a version field, can be sorted in the case of UUIDv7, a standardized format means easy interoperability (eg, encoding, validation, serialization etc), and databases can optimize storage and efficiency when using a native UUID type.

If just using random bytes, you still need to make decisions about how to serialize, put it in a URL, logging etc so you’re basically just inventing you’re own format anyway for a problem that’s already solved.

Has anything post-dating the DCE-RPC era ever looked at the version of a UUID?

That the problem is already solved does not mean the solution is good. Or that you can’t solve it better.

A uuidv4 is 15.25 bytes of payload encoded in 36 bytes (using standard serialisation), in a format which is not conducive to gui text selection.

You can encode 16 whole bytes in 26 bytes of easily selectable content by using a random source and encoding in base32, or 22 by using base58.

Why the hate though? Is someone forcing you to use them against your will? If you need 128 bits of crypto.Rand() for your usecase, you can just use that right?

I treat UUIDv4s as 128 random bits and it triggers ppl.

It needs several non-random bits to mark it as a v4 or it's not a uuidv4

To be fair that’s literally just a waste of resources. If you want 128 random bits just get 128 random bits from the underlying source, unless your host langage is amazingly deficient it’s just as easy.

they should be prefixed with something human readable so you can tell a service bot api key from a human developer api key or whatever.

hahahaha as if humans wouldn't just give their hey to the bot

That misses the point. The point is for easy validation that the key was generated appropriately. Many api keys have a standard prefix for just this reason. It especially helps on documentation where the key name might be confused with the value: "your key starts with hnkey-"

I hate UUIDv4, don't care about the rest. UUIDv4 is just random bytes with hyphens inserted in random places and some bytes reserved to indicate that this is in fact a UUID. This is wasteful and stupid

Is reserving 6 bits really that bad?

You can use different encodings based on context, just like with a random blob of bytes.

You aren't supposed to store the hyphens, and that's the same for all versions.

What if I want an ID in the URL? Parse it back and forth? And what if for example, nodejs's UUID api only gives me the string representation of the ID?

To minimize the storage space while having a URL-safe representation, yeah you'd want to serialise/deserialise on the boundary of presenting it to API consumers. I think the same for any ID that has an efficient binary representation as well as needing to represent it in ASCII.

UUIDs aren't random by design, and the structure is not pointless. Calling something you don't understand "stupid" is probably not a good approach to life.

One example where UUIDs are useful is usage as primary keys in databases. The constraints provide benefits, such as global uniqueness across distributed systems.

The global uniqueness of a uuid v4 is the global uniqueness of pulling 122 bits from a source of entropy. Structure has nothing to do with it, and pulling 128 bits from the same source is strictly (if not massively) superior at that.

I stand corrected. I was thinking of the sequential nature of uuid 7, or SQL servers sequential id.

Every time I read these types of Go issues, I think I am reading a writeup of a highschool debate club. It's like there is debate just for the sake of debate.

I understand the defensiveness about implementing new features, and I understand the rationale to keep the core as small as possible. But come on, it's not like UUID is a new thing. As the opener already pointed out, UUID is essential in pretty much all languages for interoperability so it makes sense to have that in the standard language.

Anyways, I'm just happy we'll get generic methods after 10 years of debates, I suppose. Maybe we'll get an export keyword before another 10, too. Then CGo will finally be usable outside a single package without those overlapping autogenerated symbols...

It's an open Github issues thread. What do you expect?

Which is why I changed from being on Gonuts during pre-1.0 days to only touch Go if I really have to.

However I would still advocate for it over C in scenarios easily covered by TinyGo and TamaGo.

I mean that's pretty common in most OSS projects just because you have free entry to the debate.

If you want to see go-uniquie highschool debate club, look at Go team attitude to fixing logging, where community proposed multiple ways of solving it, Go team rejected all of them and then made massive navel-gazing post that could be summed up "well, there is multiple proposals THAT MEANS PEOPLE ARE UNSURE ON THE ISSUE so we won't do shit"

...then removed every question related to go logging (that were common in previous ones) in their yearly survey

It's called bikeshedding. It's highly annoying, but unfortunately every public mailing list or tracker is prone to it.

The maintainers did the right thing by just saying "no."

UUIDs are one of those useless things standards people create so they can plop it in other standards. They don't, have never and can never solve a real problem, only hypothetical meta problems. That Go team probably sees UUID v7 and LOL'd their underpants off, you couldn't get it right the first 6 times? GTFO

The UUID stdlib debate reveals a deeper tension in API design: when does standardization help vs hurt?

UUIDs won because they're "good enough" - collision-resistant without coordination. But v7's timestamp ordering breaks that independence by leaking information. Now you need to reason about clock sync, monotonicity, privacy.

For distributed systems, I increasingly see folks moving to: use v7 internally (btree efficiency matters), expose v4 externally (don't leak creation order to clients). Add a mapping layer at the API boundary.

The real lesson: IDs are part of your API contract. If clients can infer system behavior from ID structure (request rate, shard assignment, rollout timing), that's signal you may not want to transmit. Standards help, but context still matters.