We benchmarked it, and without assembly optimizations, uhash still exceeds perl.
It's not just the speed of the hashing itself that you have to consider, but also how it interacts with the rest of the dictionary implementation, and how it behaves under access patters found in a typical Python program. The core Python developers have put a LOT of effort over the years into tuning the Python dict implementation specially for Python. It's not reasonable to expect them to suddenly throw all that away and replace it with something that's completely untried in this context! Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+