# Beryl

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Beryl is a format for unique identifiers. This crate implements utilities for generating these identifiers and splitting them into their component parts.

## Crystals
Beryl identifiers, or Crystals, are encoded into 64 bits as follows:
- **Generator ID**: 14-bit unsigned integer identifying the Crystal's generator. Further segmentation is
left to the application, as conflicts will not occur unless the scheme is changed unevenly over
less than a millisecond.
- **Generator Counter**: 8-bit unsigned integer incremented for every Crystal generated and
reset each millisecond. This allows each generator to operate at up to 256,000 Crystals/sec.
- **Timestamp**: 42-bit unsigned integer number of milliseconds since an application-defined
epoch.

## Epochs
Beryl defines no standard epoch which a timestamp should be measured from, as the limited
timestamp size (2<sup>42</sup> milliseconds is about 140 years) may call for non-standard epochs. For
ease of use, the UNIX Epoch should be best.