On 19/12/2007, Jamie Allsop <ja11sop@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
First apologies for the belated review and its brevity - I really had hoped I'd have time to be more thorough, but here goes.
Thanks for reviewing the library - suggestions are always welcome, especially help with improving the documentation. I'll look into your suggestions soon (they all look worthwhile).
One thing that would be nice are some performance details, perhaps comparisons against some other library implementations using the same has function. Just a thought.
A problem is that some implementations require better quality hash functions because they use a power of 2 for the number of buckets. So it's probably worth trying a some different hash functions.
I haven't done a lot of work with hash containers before (I haven't needed to). I DO need to make heavy use of them now so this library is very timely. I've unfortunately not been able to get time to replace our existing implementation with this one and do a performance comparison.
I did some informal benchmarking a while ago and found the gcc version to be a little faster (sorry, I didn't record the figures). I think this was partly because it doesn't fully support allocators. I'm a bit weary of publishing artificial speed comparisons so some serious real life comparisons would be very useful. I'll see if I can dig out my benchmarks, they used boost headers as test data so they weren't completely unrealistic. Daniel