Snowflake ID[1] is another system related to those in the article. It uses 64 bits only, and has good sharding support, so can be more useful in some contexts. However, it naturally has worse independent random-collision chances than a 128 bit system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID
First time hearing about CUID too, but have used ULID before. ULID is basically just 48 bits of timestamp + 80 bits of randomness, while CUID adds a counter for monotonicity, and a client fingerprint for collision resistance, presumably at the cost of less bits of randomness?
Would love to hear experts chime in on the tradeoffs here:
In terms of collision resistance, how much does adding a client fingerprint component really help? 80 bits of randomness in ULID already sounds pretty collision resistant to me, since that's a 50% chance of collision after generating 2^40 IDs. It kind of feels like the risk of collision on the fingerprinting mechanism itself (here it's described as 2 chars from PID and 2 chars from hostname for node, which honestly sounds a little bit shakey to me) combined with the reduced bits of randomness could undermine any potential gains in collision resistance through client fingerprinting.
Do folks know of examples where collision resistance through 80 bits or more randomness has failed in practice and generated collisions? Would love to see more reading material on this kind of stuff.
