Underscore library comes with the uniqueId() function that generates globally unique IDs to use in code. But it was not enough for my Backbone models as I needed the IDs to be unique across  invocations and users, i.e. something like UUID.

I have been using this code snippet to generate pseudo unique IDs for sometime. Since it's a utility function and it made lots of sense to move it to Underscore itself. Here's how I did it.

_.mixin({
      guid : function(){
        return 'xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx'.replace(/[xy]/g, function(c) {
          var r = Math.random()*16|0, v = c == 'x' ? r : (r&0x3|0x8);
          return v.toString(16);
        });
      }
    });

Once the above code is in place, then creating a unique ID is as simple as calling _.guid().

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