[Mono-dev] String.GetHashCode Discussion.

[Alan McGovern]

Hey,

With the recent talk on GetHashCode(), I was just taking a look at the code.
I decided to try my hand at seeing what would happen performancewise if i
made the function work with an int* as opposed to char*. Turns out i ended
up with something which was 50% slower, but also had 50% less collisions on
a rather large english dictionary dataset (17mb of words, probably a few
dupes).

Just in case it's of any use, i've attached it here, though i'd say there
are much better ones out there. This was purely accidental ;)


        public unsafe static int GetHashCode(string s)
        {
            int h = 0;
            int rem = s.Length & 3;
            fixed (char* c = s)
            {
                int* start = (int*)c;
                int* end = start + s.Length - rem;

                for (int* i = end; i >= start; i--)
                    h = (h << 5) - h + *i;

                char* cc = c + s.Length - rem;
                for (char* i = cc + rem; i >= cc; i--)
                    h = (h << 5) - h + *i;

                return h;
            }
        }

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:33 PM, Marek Safar <marek.safar at seznam.cz> wrote:

> Hello Andreas,
> > Imho we should revert the change, especially as MS seems to also have an
> > implementation with low collisions (and in fact this will be what people
> are
> > expecting from a hashcode without any further explanation) we should do
> the
> > same. Otherwise this might drive some implementations into huge perf
> > problems.
> >
> I reverted my changes for now to produce same bad/good results. However,
> I tried to port another implementation which seems to produce much more
> better results for both scenarios but it still needs more testing. I'll
> send a patch for review when I am done.
>
> Marek
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>
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