That is what the OP is saying, that their implementation guarantees strictly monotonic timestamps (ie it will tell you how they interleave in your parlance). Gapless sequences is a different (but related) problem. Its not a new problem and there are existing solutions, op is just presenting their Rust implementation with some enhancements. I suggest you read the wikipedia article on Race conditions and then read/skim the article on Lamport timestamps to understand what OP is trying to solve/claiming to do.