The RcppUUID package on CRAN has been providing UUIDs (based on the underlying Boost library) for several years. Written by Artem Klemsov and maintained in this gitlab repo, the package is a very nice example of clean and straightforward library binding. As it had dropped off CRAN over a relatively minor issue, I descided to adopted it with the previous 1.1.2 release made quite recently.
This release adds new high-resolution clock-based UUIDs accordingt to the v7 spec. Internally 100ns increments are represented. The resulting UUIDs are both unique and sortable. I added this recent example to the README.md which illustrated both the implicit ordering and uniqueness. The unit tests check this with a much larger N.
> RcppUUID::uuid_generate_time(5)
[1] "0194d8fa-7add-735c-805b-6bbf22b78b9e" "0194d8fa-7add-735e-8012-3e0e53895b19"
[3] "0194d8fa-7add-735e-81af-bc67bb435ade" "0194d8fa-7add-735e-82b1-405bf57963ad"
[5] "0194d8fa-7add-735f-801e-efe57078b2e7"
>While one can revert from the UUID object to the clock
object, I am not aware of a text parser so there is currently no inverse
function (as ulid offers) for the character
representation.
The NEWS entry for the two releases follows.
Changes in version 1.2.0 (2025-02-12)
- Time-based UUIDs, ie version 7, can now be generated (requiring Boost 1.86 or newer as in the current BH package)
Changes in version 1.1.2 (2025-01-31)
- New maintainer to resurrect package on CRAN
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppUUID page, or the github repo.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.