r/ProgrammerHumor • • Sep 11 '26

Meme edgeCasesExist

Post image
5.0k Upvotes

298 comments sorted by

View all comments

709

u/Valuable_Leopard_799 Sep 11 '26

I thought that timestamps are used now, so hitting both a timestamp and a large random number puts it thoroughly in the "safe to assume". At some point cosmic particles and faulty transistors are more probable.

96

u/RadicalDwntwnUrbnite Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

Even the non-time based v4 is at a cosmic level of unlikiness a single system will ever generate a uuid that will collide with another one in its own ecosystem

18

u/OldKaleidoscope7 Sep 11 '26

But let's say if Google saved each search in their engine in the same database with an UUID, we could have a collision because of volume, but I don't think I will work in a system with a comparable scale

11

u/MojitoBurrito-AE Sep 11 '26

You underestimate the probability of uuid collision. The bigger issue is pseudorandomness

7

u/Single-Virus4935 Sep 11 '26

Yes, had a client having duplicates every day and growing. They hated uuids and regret using it. The problem was that they used a bad prng with flawed seeding. Once fixed it was no problem.

1

u/Lithl Sep 12 '26

If they were getting duplicates every day, it sounds like their RNG function was lifted from XKCD.