[marcobambini]

Good question, in the current version, compaction is left to the caller.

The library does a few things to keep key growth practical:

  1. generate_n_keys_between: if you know you're inserting N items at once (e.g. a bulk paste or drag of multiple items), it distributes them evenly in a single call rather than chaining N sequential generate_key_between calls, which would produce progressively longer keys.

  2. Higher bases: base62 (default) and base95 give you a much wider branching factor per character than base10, so keys stay shorter under the same insertion patterns.

But yes, in a long-lived list with adversarial insertion patterns (always inserting at the same spot), keys will grow unboundedly, that's inherent to the algorithm. In practice, compaction is an application-level concern: you'd pick a quiet moment (or a sync boundary, if you're doing CRDT-style collaboration) and renumber the whole list with fresh, evenly spaced keys.

The library gives you generate_n_keys_between(NULL, NULL, n) which makes trivial to generate N fresh keys for the whole list in one call.