My random Googling turned up a new hash function tonight: "HighwayHash".  It's a keyed hash function like the SipHash we now use for hashing strings / bytes / etc for our lovely dicts.

Key points:

• Apache 2 license
• Can use SIMD
• "5x faster than SipHash"

I think they mean 5x faster than their SipHash implementation, which they claim is an optimized implementation (but IIUC doesn't use SIMD).

Source is here:

https://github.com/google/highwayhash

AFAICT they have multiple implementations to leverage different processor features, but one is vanilla portable C** so it should run everywhere Python 3 does.  In fact it already has a Python 3 package ("pip3 install highwayhash-cffi") in case you want to play around with it.

Since the choice of SipHash is a private implementation detail, and since we all like fast things, is it worth considering switching to HighwayHash?  Don't ask me, I'm only a release manager (for a version nobody cares about anymore).  These things are above my pay grade.

Cheers,

/arry

** They claim it's "C90", which I gather is C89 for Europeans hipsters who like obscure, withdrawn standards.