Tue, 04 Jun 2024

ulid 0.4.0 on CRAN: Extended to Milliseconds

A new version of the ulid package is now on CRAN. The packages provides ‘universally (unique) lexicographically (sortable) identifiers’ – see the spec at GitHub for details on those – which offer sorting which uuids lack. The R package provides access via the standard C++ library, had been put together by Bob Rudis and is now maintained by me.

Mark Heckmann noticed that a ulid round trip of generating and unmarshalling swallowed subsecond informationm and posted on a well-known site I no longer go to. Duncan Murdoch was kind enough to open an issue to make me aware, and in it included the nice minimally complete verifiable example by Mark.

It turns out that this issue was known, documented upstream in two issues and fixed in fork by the authors of those issues, Chris Bove. It replaces time_t as the value of record (constrained at the second resolution) with a proper std::chrono object which offers milliseconds (and much more, yay Modern C++). So I switched the two main files of library to his, and updated the wrapper code to interface from POSIXct to std::chrono object. And with that we are in business. The original example of five ulids create 100 millisecond part, then unmarshalled and here printed as a data.table as data.frame by default truncates to seconds:

> library(ulid)
> gen_ulid <- \(sleep) replicate(5, {Sys.sleep(sleep); generate()})
> u <- gen_ulid(.1)
> df <- unmarshal(u)
> data.table::data.table(df)
                        ts              rnd
                    <POSc>           <char>
1: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.588 CSQAJBPNX75R0G5A
2: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.688 XZX0TREDHD6PC1YR
3: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.789 0YK9GKZVTED27QMK
4: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.890 SC3M3G6KGPH7S50S
5: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.990 TSKCBWJ3TEKCPBY0
>

We updated the documentation accordingly, and added some new tests as well. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.4.0 (2024-06-03)

  • Switch two functions to fork by Chris Bove using std::chrono instead of time_t for consistent millisecond resolution (#3 fixing #2)

  • Updated documentation showing consistent millisecond functionality

  • Added unit tests for millisecond functionality

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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