I'm very unknowledgable about hasing, so sorry if ...

# random

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

I'm very unknowledgable about hasing, so sorry if this is a dumb question. I know that "perfect hashing" is possible when the keys are known in advance (and thus presumably of a fixed size). I have a MutableMap<MyKey, Any?>, where MyKey is an empty class completely within my control. Is there some way to have "perfect hashing" here by modifying MyKey to use some custom hashcodes?

[Sam]

What's your goal? A perfect hash on its own won't make a hash table work any better 🤔

[ephemient]

you can override hashCode(), although there's no guarantee that HashMap will use the correct number of buckets or the right bucket distribution

[ephemient]

if you defined your own specialized MutableMap class you could guarantee that

[ephemient]

(unfortunately implementing AbstractMutableMap is not straightforward, as the interface requires it to be intertwined with entries: MutableSet<MutableEntry> which will likely need to be a custom AbstractMutableSet too)