README

This is a C version of Bob Jenkin's spooky hash. The only advantage over
Bob's original version is that it is in C, not C++ and comes with
some test and benchmark code.

This is a very competitive hash function, but is somewhat unportable
(64bit little endian only). It's more portable than some of the 
contenders like CityHash.

Quoting Bobs original description:

// SpookyHash: a 128-bit noncryptographic hash function
// By Bob Jenkins, public domain
//   Oct 31 2010: alpha, framework + SpookyHash::Mix appears right
//   Oct 31 2011: alpha again, Mix only good to 2^^69 but rest appears right
//   Dec 31 2011: beta, improved Mix, tested it for 2-bit deltas
//   Feb  2 2012: production, same bits as beta
//   Feb  5 2012: adjusted definitions of uint* to be more portable
//   Mar 30 2012: 3 bytes/cycle, not 4.  Alpha was 4 but wasn't thorough enough.
// 
// Up to 3 bytes/cycle for long messages.  Reasonably fast for short messages.
// All 1 or 2 bit deltas achieve avalanche within 1% bias per output bit.
//
// This was developed for and tested on 64-bit x86-compatible processors.
// It assumes the processor is little-endian.  There is a macro
// controlling whether unaligned reads are allowed (by default they are).
// This should be an equally good hash on big-endian machines, but it will
// compute different results on them than on little-endian machines.
//
// Google's CityHash has similar specs to SpookyHash, and CityHash is faster
// on some platforms.  MD4 and MD5 also have similar specs, but they are orders
// of magnitude slower.  CRCs are two or more times slower, but unlike 
// SpookyHash, they have nice math for combining the CRCs of pieces to form 
// the CRCs of wholes.  There are also cryptographic hashes, but those are even 
// slower than MD5.