Three Unlikely Successful Features of D

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, March 21, 2012 22:18:16 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2012-03-21 20:49, Sean Kelly wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Would it be possible to use different algorithms on different platforms?

I'm sure that it would be, but it sounds like part of his complaint is that 
you end up with different implementations per platform with using MurmurHash, 
and using a different hash algorithm per architecture is just as bad in that 
respect. If you're trying to absolutely maximize performance though, that 
would probably be the way to go if there isn't one which is a clear winner on 
all architectures. It doesn't matter all that much for dmd at present though, 
since it's x86-only.

- Jonathan M Davis