Hash Functions are incredibly useful and versatile. In general, they are used to map a space to one much smaller space. Of course that means that two objects may hash to the same value (collision), but this is because you are reducing the space ( pigeonhole principle ). The efficiency of the function largely depends on the size of the hash space.
It comes as a surprise then that a lot of Java hashCode functions are using multiplication to produce the hash code of a new object as eg follows ( creating-a-hashcode-method-java )
@Override
public int hashCode() {
final int prime = 31;
int result = 1;
result = prime * result + ((email == null) ? 0 : email.hashCode());
result = prime * result + (int) (id ^ (id >>> 32));
result = prime * result + ((name == null) ? 0 : name.hashCode());
return result;
}
If we want to mix two hashcodes in the same range, xor should be much better than addition and is I think traditionally used. If we wanted to increase the space, shifting by some bytes and then xoring would still imho make sense. I guess multiplying by 31 is almost the same as shifting one hash by 1 and then adding but it should be much less efficient...
As it is the recommended approach though, I think I am missing something. So my question is why would this be?
Notes:
int
type in Java can be used to represent any whole number from -2147483648 to 2147483647. The answer to this is a mixture of different factors:
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