Three Unlikely Successful Features of D

[Sean Kelly]

On Mar 20, 2012, at 10:54 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
> 
> It's probably far too early to think about this with all the other important issues you're addressing but have you given much thought to improving the hashing function?  I haven't hit any issues with the speed of the current hasher but better performance is always welcome. MurmurHash seems to be all the rage these days with a lot of languages and systems adopting it <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MurmurHash> (it compiles down to ~52 instructions on x86). It'd be interesting to see benchmarks with it. I'm not sure where the current hashing function lives to see what it's like.

Druntime actually did use MurmurHash for a while and then dropped it because the site had no copyright license for the code (a mistake that has since been rectified).  I'd consider switching back, though I don't really like that MurmurHash has a number of separate implementations targeted at different platforms, each having different performance characteristics.  It's 4x faster than SuperFastHash on x86 but 10x slower than SuperFastHash on SPARC, for example.