I've bee using ULIDs in python for about a year now and so far have been super happy with them, so a) thank you for maintaining this! b) I always felt a bit uneasy about the way the spec describes the monotonicity component. Personally I just rely on the random aspect as I am fortunate enough to say that two events in the same millisecond are effectively simultaneous.
At that point, it's basically just UUID7 with Crockford base32 encoding, more or less.
IMHO the in-process monotonically increasing feature of ULID is misguided. As you mention, distributed ids are a pain. The instant you start talking distributed, monotonic counters or orderable events (two threads count as distributed in this case), you need to talk things like Lamport clocks or other hybrid clock strategies. It's better to reach for the right tools in this case, vs half-baked monotonic-only-in-this-process vague guarantee.
At that point, it's basically just UUID7 with Crockford base32 encoding, more or less.
IMHO the in-process monotonically increasing feature of ULID is misguided. As you mention, distributed ids are a pain. The instant you start talking distributed, monotonic counters or orderable events (two threads count as distributed in this case), you need to talk things like Lamport clocks or other hybrid clock strategies. It's better to reach for the right tools in this case, vs half-baked monotonic-only-in-this-process vague guarantee.