serial_int

Safe, easy-to-use auto-increment integers

Serial (or auto-increment) integers make great unique identifiers because they do not need to be large (i.e. using more memory) to prevent collisions. They are always unique until they reach their max value, mimicking the behavior of PostgreSQL's SERIAL data type. Creating serial values has minimal performance impact because it relies on simple adding rather than hashing or randomizing.

This crate provides a generator (that is also an iterator) that outputs serial values. By default, any unsigned integer from the standard library can be generated. This is essentially a counter, a simple iterator for integers. This crate is appropriately tiny.

For safety and stability, the generator "saturates" the values instead of overflowing. This guarantees that the output values are unique to that generator (except for the greatest possible value, e.g. u8::MAX or u32::MAX).

Features

Usage

Use a generator to create unique identifiers.

```rust let mut gen = SerialGenerator::::new();

asserteq!(0, gen.generate()); asserteq!(1, gen.generate()); ```

To support concurrency, simply use a wrapper. You can also use static ref for generators that don't have an owner.

```rust fn main() { let usersmutex = Arc::new(Mutex::new(Vec::new())); let usersclone = Arc::clone(&users_mutex);

let handle = thread::spawn(move || {
    let alice = User::new("alice@domain.xyz");
    let mary = User::new("mary@domain.xyz");
    let mut users = users_clone.lock().unwrap();

    users.push(alice);
    users.push(mary);
});

handle.join().unwrap();

let bob = User::new("bob@domain.xyz");
let fred = User::new("fred@domain.xyz");
let mut users = users_mutex.lock().unwrap();

users.push(bob);
users.push(fred);

assert_eq!(0, users[0].id);
assert_eq!(1, users[1].id);
assert_eq!(2, users[2].id);
assert_eq!(3, users[3].id);

}

lazystatic! { static ref USERID_GEN: Mutex = Mutex::new(SerialGenerator::new()); }

struct User { id: u32, email: String, }

impl User { pub fn new(email: &str) -> Self { User { id: USERIDGEN.lock().unwrap().generate(), email: email.to_string(), } } } ```

Contributing

Submit a patch. If you add a new implementation of Serial, add a submodule to tests using the provided functions.