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continuational on Feb 19, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Things you should do now (2011)

Don't use a raw integer as the ID type. Use different types for different IDs: UserId, OrganizationId, etc.

It's a common bug to get different ID types mixed up, and a gigantic offset will do nothing to help you with that.

MaxBarraclough on Feb 19, 2021 [–]

I agree, the 'microtype' pattern can be a good way of getting the type-checker to catch silly mistakes.

In Ada it's standard practice. In C++ you really need a library to do it easily, but there's a good one out there ready to go:

https://github.com/foonathan/type_safe/

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