On 08/07/10 04:40, Simon Josefsson wrote: > I suspect FNV or Xorshift would be faster, since they are so simple:
Yes, they'd be faster, but there may be some collision problems with those. FNV would seem better suited, since it's a hash function. I did quick scan for relevant articles and found this quote: "FNV is not a collision-resistant function and has some known collision issues, which are common among multiplicative functions. Therefore, the probabilistic rationale presented in the paper, which assumes a perfect hash, should be taken with a grain of salt. Generally, given that the performance benchmark is block-level crypto hashing, using MD5 would seem an appropriate choice, especially for inputs with lower entropy which would present a serious problem for simple hashes." Roussev V, Richard GG III, Marziale L. Multi-resolution similarity hashing. Digit Invest 4, 1 (2007), S105-13. <http://www.dfrws.org/2007/proceedings/p105-roussev.pdf> True, sort -R isn't intended for crypto applications, but it is supposed to work well with low-entropy keys. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone.
