So having selected Google’s old CityHash package as the focus of my optimization project, I had some issues with actually getting it to build out of the box. First, there were issues with configuring it. After those were solved, I had issues with my make commands. It seemed to point out all kinds of errors C++ related errors whenever I tried to build it. But after investigating issues with versions of gcc (which didn’t end up being the problem), I found a part of the README that offered an alternative with an additional compiler flag, -msse4.2. From what I can tell, this allows for SSE instructions, which stands for Streaming SIMD Extensions. This is pretty unexpected for me, considering there is a comment in the code itself saying:
It's probably possible to create even faster has functions [...] by using SIMD instructions[.]
My guess is that either the SIMD stuff is in another part of the package, or is done by the compiler and not hard-coded. I will still take my attempts to speed it up. Now, let’s benchmark this thing.
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