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 Cheers, //arry/ ** They claim it's "C90", which I gather is C89 for Europeans hipsters who like obscure, withdrawn standards.