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stduuid/paper.md
Marius Bancila 000ddcc150
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A Proposal for a Universally Unique Identifier Library

I. Motivation

Universally unique identifiers (uuid), also known as Globally Unique Identifiers (guids), are commonly used in many types of applications to uniquely identify data. A standard uuid library would benefit developers that currently have to either use operating system specific APIs for creating new uuids or resort to 3rd party libraries, such as boost::uuid.

UUIDs are 128-bit numbers that are for most practical purposes unique, without depending on a central registration authority for ensuring their uniqueness. Although the probability of UUID duplication exists, it is negligible. According to Wikipedia, "for there to be a one in a billion chance of duplication, 103 trillion version 4 UUIDs must be generated." UUID is an Internet Engineering Task Force standard described by RFC 4122.

The library proposed on this paper is a light one: it enables developers to generate UUIDs based on the operation system facilities, serialize and deserialize UUIDs to and from strings, validate UUIDs and other common ensuing operations.

II. Impact On the Standard

This proposal is a pure library extension. It does not require changes to any standard classes, functions or headers. It does not require any changes in the core language, and it has been implemented in standard C++ as per ISO/IEC 14882:2017.

III. Design Decisions

The proposed library, that should be available in a new header called <uuid> in the namespace std, provides:

  • a class called uuid that represents a universally unique identifier
  • strongly type enums uuid_variant and uuid_version to represent the possible variant and version types of a UUID
  • function objects that generate UUIDs, called generators: basic_uuid_random_generator<T>, uuid_random_generator, uuid_name_generator, and uuid_default_generator
  • string conversion functions std::to_string(), std::to_wstring() as well as an overloaded operator<< for std::basic_ostream
  • comparison operators ==, !=, <
  • std::swap<> specialization for uuid
  • std::hash<> specialization for uuid

Default constructor

Creates a nil UUID that has all the bits set to 0 (i.e. 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000).

uuid empty;
auto empty = uuid{};

string_view constructors

Conversion constructors from std::string_view and std::wstring_view allow to create uuid instances from various strings.

The input argument must have the form xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx where x is a hexadecimal digit. Should the argument be of a different format a nil UUID would be created.

uuid id1("47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43");

std::wstring str=L"47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43";
uuid id2(str);

Iterators constructors

The conversion constructor that takes two forward iterators constructs an uuid with the content of the range [first, last). It requires the range to have exactly 16 elements, otherwise the result is a nil uuid. This constructor follows the conventions of other containers in the standard library.

std::array<uuid::value_type, 16> arr{{
   0x47, 0x18, 0x38, 0x23,
   0x25, 0x74,
   0x4b, 0xfd,
   0xb4, 0x11,
   0x99, 0xed, 0x17, 0x7d, 0x3e, 0x43
}};
uuid id(arr);

uuid::value_type arr[16] = {
   0x47, 0x18, 0x38, 0x23,
   0x25, 0x74,
   0x4b, 0xfd,
   0xb4, 0x11,
   0x99, 0xed, 0x17, 0x7d, 0x3e, 0x43 };
uuid id(arr);

Capacity

Member function size() indicates the number of bytes in the UUID. Because this is a fixed size structure this function always returns 16.

Member function nil() indicates whether the uuid has all the bits set to 0. A nil uuid is created by the default constructor or by the string conversion constructors when failing to parse the input argument.

uuid id;
assert(id.nil());
assert(id.size() == 16);

Iterators

Constant and mutable iterators allow direct access to the underlaying uuid data. This enables both direct reading and writing of the uuid bits. The uuid class has both const and non-const begin() and end() members to return constant and mutable iterators to the first and the one-past-last element of the UUID data.

std::array<uuid::value_type, 16> arr{{
   0x47, 0x18, 0x38, 0x23,
   0x25, 0x74,
   0x4b, 0xfd,
   0xb4, 0x11,
   0x99, 0xed, 0x17, 0x7d, 0x3e, 0x43
}};

uuid id;
assert(id.nil());

std::copy(std::cbegin(arr), std::cend(arr), std::begin(id));
assert(!id.nil());
assert(id.string() == "47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43");

size_t i = 0;
for (auto const & b : id)
   assert(arr[i++] == b);

Because the internal representation may not be a straightforward array of bytes and may have arbitrary endianness iterators are not defined as pointers.

variant and version

Member functions variant() and version() allows to check the variant type of the uuid and respetively the version type. These are defined by two strongly typed enums called uuid_variant and uuid_version.

uuid id("47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43");
assert(id.version() == uuid_version::random_number_based);
assert(id.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);

Swapping

Both member and non-member swap functions including a std::swap<> specialization that enable the swapping of uuid values.

uuid empty;
uuid id("47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43");

assert(empty.nil());
assert(!id.nil());

std::swap(empty, id);

assert(!empty.nil());
assert(id.nil());

empty.swap(id);

assert(empty.nil());
assert(!id.nil());

String conversion

Non-member functions to_string() and to_wstring() return a string with the UUID formatted to the canonical textual representation xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx, where x is a lower case hexadecimal digit.

uuid id("47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43");
assert(id.string() == "47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43");
assert(id.wstring() == L"47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43");

operator== and operator!=

Non-member operators == and != are provided in order to test the equality/inequality of two uuid values.

uuid empty;
uuid id("47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43");

assert(empty == empty);
assert(id == id);
assert(empty != id);

operator<

Although it does not make sense to check whether a uuid is less or less or equal then another uuid, the overloading of this operator for uuid is necessary in order to be able to store uuid values in some containers such as std::set that by default use the operator to compare keys.

std::set<std::uuid> ids{
   uuid{},
   uuid("47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43")
};

assert(ids.size() == 2);
assert(ids.find(uuid{}) != ids.end());

Hashing

A std::hash<> specialization for uuid is provided in order to enable the use of uuids in associative unordered containers such as std::unordered_set.

std::unordered_set<uuid> ids{
   uuid{},
   uuid("47183823-2574-4bfd-b411-99ed177d3e43"),
};

assert(ids.size() == 2);
assert(ids.find(uuid{}) != ids.end());

Generating new uuids

Several function objects, called generators, are provided in order to create different versions of UUIDs.

Examples for generating new UUIDs with the basic_uuid_random_generator class:

{
  basic_uuid_random_generator<std::mt19937> dgen;
  auto id1 = dgen();
  assert(!id1.nil());
  assert(id1.size() == 16);
  assert(id1.version() == uuid_version::random_number_based);
  assert(id1.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);
}
{
  basic_uuid_random_generator<std::ranlux48_base> dgen;
  auto id1 = dgen();
  assert(!id1.nil());
  assert(id1.size() == 16);
  assert(id1.version() == uuid_version::random_number_based);
  assert(id1.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);
}
{
  std::random_device rd;
  std::ranlux48_base generator(rd());

  basic_uuid_random_generator<std::ranlux48_base> dgen(&generator);
  auto id1 = dgen();
  assert(!id1.nil());
  assert(id1.size() == 16);
  assert(id1.version() == uuid_version::random_number_based);
  assert(id1.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);
}
{
  std::random_device rd;
  auto generator = std::make_unique<std::mt19937>(rd());

  basic_uuid_random_generator<std::mt19937> dgen(generator.get());
  auto id1 = dgen();
  assert(!id1.nil());
  assert(id1.size() == 16);
  assert(id1.version() == uuid_version::random_number_based);
  assert(id1.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);      
}

Examples for generating new UUIDs with the uuid_random_generator type alias:

uuid_random_generator dgen;
auto id1 = dgen();
assert(!id1.nil());
assert(id1.size() == 16);
assert(id1.version() == uuid_version::random_number_based);
assert(id1.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);

Examples for genearting new UUIDs with the uuid_name_generator class:

uuid_name_generator dgen(uuid{"415ccc2b-f5cf-4ec1-b544-45132a518cc8");
auto id1 = dgen("john");
assert(!id1.nil());
assert(id1.size() == 16);
assert(id1.version() == uuid_version::name_based_sha1);
assert(id1.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);

auto id2 = dgen("jane");
assert(!id2.nil());
assert(id2.size() == 16);
assert(id2.version() == uuid_version::name_based_sha1);
assert(id2.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);

auto id3 = dgen("jane");
assert(!id3.nil());
assert(id3.size() == 16);
assert(id3.version() == uuid_version::name_based_sha1);
assert(id3.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);

auto id4 = dgen(L"jane");
assert(!id4.nil());
assert(id4.size() == 16);
assert(id4.version() == uuid_version::name_based_sha1);
assert(id4.variant() == uuid_variant::rfc);

assert(id1 != id2);
assert(id2 == id3);
assert(id3 != id4);

Examples for genearting new UUIDs with the uuid_default_generator class:

uuid const id = uuid_default_generator{}();
assert(!id.nil());
assert(id.size() == 16);

IV. Technical Specifications

Header

Add a new header called <uuid>.

uuid_variant enum

namespace std {
   enum class uuid_variant
   {
      ncs,
      rfc,
      microsoft,
      future
   };
}

uuid_version enum

namespace std {
   enum class uuid_version
   {
      none = 0,
      time_based = 1,
      dce_security = 2,
      name_based_md5 = 3,
      random_number_based = 4,
      name_based_sha1 = 5
   };
}

uuid class

namespace std {
struct uuid
{
  struct uuid_const_iterator {};
  
  struct uuid_iterator {};
public:
  typedef uint8_t               value_type;
  typedef uint8_t&              reference;
  typedef uint8_t const&        const_reference;
  typedef uuid_iterator         iterator;
  typedef uuid_const_iterator   const_iterator;
  typedef std::size_t           size_type;
  typedef std::ptrdiff_t        difference_type;

  static constexpr size_t state_size = 16;

public:
  constexpr uuid() noexcept;

  template<typename ForwardIterator>
  explicit uuid(ForwardIterator first, ForwardIterator last);

  explicit uuid(std::string_view str);
  explicit uuid(std::wstring_view str);

  constexpr uuid_variant variant() const noexcept;
  constexpr uuid_version version() const noexcept;
  constexpr std::size_t size() const noexcept;
  constexpr bool nil() const noexcept;

  void swap(uuid & other) noexcept;
  friend void swap(uuid& lhs, uuid& rhs) noexcept;

  iterator begin() noexcept;
  const_iterator begin() const noexcept;
  iterator end() noexcept;
  const_iterator end() const noexcept;

private:
  friend bool operator==(uuid const & lhs, uuid const & rhs) noexcept;
  friend bool operator<(uuid const & lhs, uuid const & rhs) noexcept;

  template <class Elem, class Traits>
  friend std::basic_ostream<Elem, Traits> & operator<<(std::basic_ostream<Elem, Traits> &s, uuid const & id);
};

non-member functions

namespace std {
   inline bool operator== (uuid const& lhs, uuid const& rhs) noexcept;
   inline bool operator!= (uuid const& lhs, uuid const& rhs) noexcept;
   inline bool operator< (uuid const& lhs, uuid const& rhs) noexcept;
   
   template <class Elem, class Traits>
   std::basic_ostream<Elem, Traits> & operator<<(std::basic_ostream<Elem, Traits> &s, uuid const & id);

   std::string to_string(uuid const & id);
   std::wstring to_wstring(uuid const & id);
}

Generators

basic_uuid_random_generator<T> is a class template for generating random or pseudo-random UUIDs (version 4, i.e. uuid_version::random_number_based). The type template parameter represents a function object that implements both the RandomNumberEngine and UniformRandomBitGenerator concepts. basic_uuid_random_generator can be either default constructed or constructed with a reference or pointer to a an objects that satisfies the UniformRandomNumberGenerator requirements.

template <typename UniformRandomNumberGenerator>
class basic_uuid_random_generator 
{
public:
  typedef uuid result_type;

  basic_uuid_random_generator();
  explicit basic_uuid_random_generator(UniformRandomNumberGenerator& gen);
  explicit basic_uuid_random_generator(UniformRandomNumberGenerator* gen);

  uuid operator()();
};

A type alias uuid_random_generator is provided for convenience as std::mt19937 is probably the preferred choice of a pesudo-random number generator engine in most cases.

using uuid_random_generator = basic_uuid_random_generator<std::mt19937>;

uuid_name_generator is a function object that generates new UUIDs from a name. It has to be initialized with another UUID and has overloaded operator() for both std::string_view and std::wstring_view.

class uuid_name_generator
{
public:
  typedef uuid result_type;

  explicit uuid_name_generator(uuid const& namespace_uuid) noexcept;
  
  uuid operator()(std::string_view name);
  uuid operator()(std::wstring_view name);
};

uuid_default_generator is a class or a type alias for another existing class that is default constructible and implements operator() to create a new uuid object. This is provided purely for convenience in order to make it simple for developers that simply want to create a new UUID to do it so in a simple manner without caring about versions, initialization, etc., with code as simple as uuid_default_generator{}().

class uuid_default_generator
{
public:
  typedef uuid result_type;

  uuid operator()();
};

Specialization

namespace std {
   template <>
   void swap(uuid & lhs, uuid & rhs);

   template <>
   struct hash<uuid>
   {
      typedef uuid argument_type;
      typedef std::size_t result_type;

      result_type operator()(argument_type const &uuid) const;
   };
}

V. References