Giving unique IDs to all nodes?

Question

I am making a class in Python that relates a lot of nodes and edges together. I also have other operations that can take two separate objects and merge them into a single object

Answer 1

You could keep a class variable and use it for ordinal ids:

class Node(object):
    _id = 0

    def __init__(self):
        self._id = Node._id
        Node._id += 1

It also has the benefit that your class will be able to know how many objects were altogether created.

This is also way cheaper than random ids.