Introducing FarmHash
March 31st, 2014 | Published in Google Open Source
We’re pleased to announce the new FarmHash family of hash functions for strings. FarmHash is a successor to CityHash, and includes many of the same tricks and techniques, several of them taken from Austin Appleby’s MurmurHash.
We’re heavily influenced by the types of CPUs that are common in Google’s datacenters, but FarmHash’s goals don’t end there. We want FarmHash to be fast and easy for developers to use in phones, tablets, and PCs too. So, yes, we’ve improved on CityHash64 and CityHash32 and so on. But we’re also catering to the case where you simply want a fast, robust hash function for hash tables, and it need not be the same on every platform. To that end, we provide sample code that has one interface harboring multiple platform-specific implementations.
Over time, we plan to expand FarmHash to include hash functions for integers, tuples, and other data. For now, it provides hash functions for strings, though some of the subroutines could be adapted to other uses.
Overall, we believe that FarmHash provides high-performance solutions to some classic problems. Please give it a try! Contributions and bug reports are most welcome.
By Geoff Pike, Software Engineer
We’re heavily influenced by the types of CPUs that are common in Google’s datacenters, but FarmHash’s goals don’t end there. We want FarmHash to be fast and easy for developers to use in phones, tablets, and PCs too. So, yes, we’ve improved on CityHash64 and CityHash32 and so on. But we’re also catering to the case where you simply want a fast, robust hash function for hash tables, and it need not be the same on every platform. To that end, we provide sample code that has one interface harboring multiple platform-specific implementations.
Over time, we plan to expand FarmHash to include hash functions for integers, tuples, and other data. For now, it provides hash functions for strings, though some of the subroutines could be adapted to other uses.
Overall, we believe that FarmHash provides high-performance solutions to some classic problems. Please give it a try! Contributions and bug reports are most welcome.
By Geoff Pike, Software Engineer