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in c#, at least, generating a new guid is a one line one call process.
A guid is easy to use and format, and it “guarantees” uniqueness.
However, is it irresponsible to just go off and generate new guids for every little thing. Could we be significantly increasing the chances of a “ta tan tan” guid collision?!
thoughts…?
GUID’s are 128 bit values. You could generate a million a second until the sun burned out and not encounter a collision. Specifically, the birthday paradox applied to a 128 bit value means even with 10e19 values, you still only have a 50% chance of a collision.
More specifically, 10e38 or ’38 digits’ as you say only seems like a measly number because of the way its expressed. Try writing it out on a piece of paper as a 1 with 38 zeros after it. Even then you probably can’t picture anything like what it represents. To do that its easier to break it down somehow. The best way to do that is to illustrate some comparative values.
There are 10e7.5 seconds in a year.
There are 10e9.8 people on earth.
There are 10e10.1 years in the current age of the universe.
So even if every person currently on earth generated a million GUIDs every second since the beginning of time you would still only have used up less than 1/10,000th of the domain.