Do we still need the uuid library?

[max-programming]

First off, amazing library and thank you for keeping this alive.

But I recently discovered that crypto.randomUUID() generates a random uuid.

So do we still need this library? If we don't, what tools don't support the randomUUID method?

[broofa]

tl;dr: If all you need is a version 4 UUID (random) and you only care about modern platforms, then randomUUID() is the way to go.

crypto.randomUUID() is a relatively new standard. It is now broadly supported, so shouldn't be an issue for most users.

That said ...

One caveat to be aware of is that because it's a new standard it is subject to the "secure context only" policy. So it won't work in non-secure contexts (i.e. web pages served in production via HTTP rather than HTTPS). See explanation of "secure context"

randomUUID() also only provides "version 4" (random) UUIDs. If you want one of the other flavors of UUID (there are 5 officially, soon to be 8), you'll still need a 3rd party solution

[max-programming]

Thanks for the detailed response ✌️

[Motii1]

I would also extend the answer. According to the documentation it is possible for Node.js to be built without including support for the node:crypto module. In such cases, attempting to import from crypto or calling require('node:crypto') will result in an error being thrown.

[broofa]

@Motii1: uuid depends on crypto so won't be of much use in that scenario... not unless you explicitly give it a rng function to work with. 🤷