CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cdictionaryuniquewrapper
user82779
user82779

Reputation: 65

C generate unique id

I am creating a C wrapper that can read types of data structures stored in text files. The interface should be that I can generate a unique id mapped to a unique data structure and modify through wrapper functions via the unique id.

The problem is that I need to be able to generate a unique id to map. I would like to not use any external library. Is there any way to do this without any large overhead?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 13479

Answers (1)

Basile Starynkevitch
Basile Starynkevitch

Reputation: 1

I guess that you are wanting the id to be (practically speaking) world-wide unique (so two processes running your program on two different computers on two different machines would always have different ids).

Otherwise, just use a static long counter; then id = counter++; in your wrapper.

You might use UUIDs for that purpose.

Or you could generate a random -e.g. 24 bytes- string (or two or three random uint64_t numbers). If your numbers are "enough" random (at least if you seed a good PRNG with a random seed at startup time, e.g. using a random source à la random(4) (or getrandom(2)) or the current time & process id & host id; be sure to use a PRNG with a big enough state) the probability of collisions should be negligible (but I am not able or willing to quantify it).

FWIW, in my MELT monitor, I am doing similar things (on Linux) in routine mom_make_random_idstr of my file random.c; the random string contains a nicely restricted set of characters (compatible with C identifiers). Look also inside Bismon's id_BM.c file and the randomid_BM & idtocbuf32_BM or inside RefPerSys.

You could also take some inspiration from MongoDb objids.

See also this related question.

Upvotes: 4

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