Another insight: I regularly find that clever O(logn) solutions are just obliterated by a few mostly-branch-free O(N) pre-passes followed by a problem that computers enjoy, like contiguous memory access and vector operations.
Use the royal "we" with caution, please.
P.S. in case it wasn't obvious, this isn't one of those "nyeh nyeh well you must be dumb because you don't cogitate in ways reminiscent of modern computing hardware" comments so much as a "you would not believe how simple-as-in-basic-as-in-limited some of us really cogitate while leveraging external systems to suggest otherwise ".
The Roc and Zig folks probably have actual numbers.
But nobody expects that. Hashmap is supposed to be faster once you have, like, ten elements. That's what was promised to us.
Benchmarked an order of magnitude faster than linear scan or binary search. I agree with your general sentiment tho, which is why I measured
There are probably even faster ways I don't know of.