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Comment by wolf550e | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I would have gone with BLAKE2. It's much faster than SHA-256 and SHA3-256: https://blake2.net/skylake.png

This is a perfect example of a situation where hashing performance doesn't matter at all.

I'm not familiar with Git internals. Does the performance of the hashing algorithm contribute significantly to how Git deals with large files or with operations over a large number of small files?

I've run into performance problems with things like MathJaX, which includes thousands (or tens of thousands?) of files as a backup method for rendering equations. (I understand each file has a single character in some typeface.)

The hash function may not matter for overall git performance in virtually all dev machine setups, but there will be a (maybe tiny, maybe larger, depending on the repo and disk io speed) difference in cpu utilization and heat generation, right?

That's a silly thing to worry about when you're developing Ruby or Java applications. My PC boots faster than the Rails console or IntelliJ.

The broader point is this: code repositories are not the only things git is used for.

JRuby?

sha3 will probably get hw accel eventually. Blake2 is less likely to. It's like the dilemma between chacha20 and a stream cipher mode for aes. An argument could be made for either, depending on application specifics and available hardware.

But like its ancestor chacha, blake2 is fast on anything that has SIMD.

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