ulid-lite

About

An implementation of the ULID ("Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier") standard.

A ULID is

• 128-bit compatible with UUID
• 1.21e+24 unique ULIDs per millisecond
• Lexicographically sortable!
• Canonically encoded as a 26 character string, as opposed to the 36 character UUID
• Uses Crockford's base32 for better efficiency and readability (5 bits per character)
• Case insensitive
• No special characters (URL safe)

Usage

From the command line

The bundled application generates a ULID and prints it to stdout:

$ ulid
01F5QNHN4G55VHQHA8XG1N6H9H

From Rust

Here is a minimal application that uses this crate:

use ulid::ulid;

fn main() {
    println!("{}", ulid());
}

The primary API is the ulid() function, which returns a String. If you would like access to the individual bits, then call ulid_raw().

ulid::ulid() -> String
ulid::ulid_raw() -> u128

For more control, the ulid::Ulid type is also available.

ulid::Ulid::new() -> ulid::Ulid

The Ulid struct is a wrapper around a u128, with a few extra methods.

let id = ulid::Ulid::new();

// They implement Display, LowerHex and UpperHex
println!("{}", id);
println!("{:x}", id);
println!("{:X}", id);

More recent ULIDs are higher than older ones:

use std::thread::sleep;
use std::time::Duration;

let a = ulid();
sleep(Duration::from_millis(1));
let b = ulid();
assert!(a < b);

To generate many ulid::Ulid values, you're recommended to use UlidGenerator. It provides the ability to seed the internal pseudo-random number generator.

// use the system's clock as the initial seed...
let mut ulid_gen = ulid::UlidGenerator::new();
let ulids: Vec<_> = ulid_gen.take(1000).collect();

// ...or use a fixed initial seed
let mut ulid_gen = ulid::UlidGenerator::from_seed(12345);
let ulid = ulid_gen.ulid();

From C

A C API is available at lib/ulid.h. Here is a minimal application that generates and prints a ULID:

#include <stdio.h>
#include "ulid.h"

int main(void) {
    char str[27];

    ulid_ctx ctx = ulid_init(0);
    ulid_write_new(&ctx, str, sizeof(str));

    printf("%s\n", str);

    return 0;
}

libulid also provides access to creating binary (128 bit) ULIDs and converting those to strings (this example is intentionally convoluted to showcase error handling):

#include <stdio.h>
#include "ulid.h"

int main(void) {
    ulid_ctx ctx;
    ulid_t id;
    char buf[64], *cur = buf;
    int n, size = sizeof(buf);

    ctx = ulid_init(0);
    ulid_new(&ctx, &id);

    n = snprintf(cur, size, "Your ULID is ");
    if (n >= size)
        return 1;
    cur += n;
    size -= n;

    n = ulid_write(&id, cur, size);
    if (n < 0) /* failed, typically buffer is too small */
        return 1;
    cur += n;
    size -= n;

    n = snprintf(cur, size, ".");
    if (n >= size)
        return 1;

    printf("%s\n", buf);
    return 0;
}

Installation

Add ulid-lite to your crate's Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
ulid-lite = "0.6.1"

Building from source

You can download and install ulid-lite directly from the main branch of the upstream repository:

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/timClicks/ulid-lite.git

Building the C interface

To regenerate the ulid.h header file, run make lib/ulid.h.

To build the libulid shared library, run make target/release/libulid.so.

Contributing

You are very welcome to contribute to project in any form, however you must abide by the Rust Code of Conduct.

Non-code contributions

Your contribution is important! Please submit an issue with your suggested change.

Code contributions

Note: these instructions have only been tested on Ubuntu, please submit corrections/improvements for other operating systems.

Setting up a development environment

To begin, you require the following tools:

• A Rust installation that includes rustc, rustup, and cargo
• git
• make

From the root of the project, run setup-devenv to install dependencies that are managed by cargo or rustup, such as MIRI:

$ ./setup-devenv

Submitting changes

ulid-lite follows the standard GitHub workflow for code changes. Please fork the project, push commits to that fork and submit a pull request (PR).

Before submitting a PR, you should run make test && make from the project's root directory, rather than cargo test. This will ensure that the MIRI tests run correctly and that artifacts can all be built.

Roadmap

PostgreSQL extension

I would like to use this crate to develop pg_ulid extension.

More features

• parsing pre-existing ULIDs
• monotonicity within the same millisecond
• overflow checks

More platforms

ulid-lite is currently only built for Linux. Patches are welcome to support more platforms.

Why add another crate?

I wanted to implement a crate with a minimalist feel. It is intended to be easy and fast to build. ulid-lite has minimal dependencies. This keeps build times fast and binary size small.

ulid does not take a long time to compile:

$ cargo clean
$ cargo build --release
   Compiling libc v0.2.94
   Compiling lazy_static v0.2.11
   Compiling rand v0.4.6
   Compiling rand v0.3.23
   Compiling xorshift v0.1.3
   Compiling ulid-lite v0.4.0 (/.../ulid-lite)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 5.68s

Perhaps more importantly however, ulid-lite is very fast. A single CPU core can generate about 35,700 ULIDs per millisecond.

$ cargo bench
...
running 2 tests
test benchmark_generation ... bench:          28 ns/iter (+/- 2)
test benchmark_serialized ... bench:          71 ns/iter (+/- 12)

Acknowledgements

I've relied on two other implementations to develop ulid-lite: