The author of this post wrote klib/khash, and uses it in his very popular cpu-intensive bioinformatics programs such as bwa (short read alignment against the human ref genome).

I've been learning rust recently. As a learning exercise, I compared the robin-hood hashing of std::collections::HashMap in rust to his klib/khash he mentions in this article , and then tried various hash functions to try and match his performance:

https://github.com/gaberudy/hash_test

No dice, his hash table is smaller and faster.

My next step is to try and implement his data structure and hashing functions directly in rust and see if I can get it to near-C performance...