Top 9 C Hashtable Projects

Klib

23 4,021 4.3 C

A standalone and lightweight C library

Project mention: Factor is faster than Zig | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-11-10

In my example the table stores the hash codes themselves instead of the keys (because the hash function is invertible)
Oh, I see, right. If determining the home bucket is trivial, then the back-shifting method is great. The issue is just that it’s not as much of a general-purpose solution as it may initially seem.
“With a different algorithm (Robin Hood or bidirectional linear probing), the load factor can be kept well over 90% with good performance, as the benchmarks in the same repo demonstrate.”
I’ve seen the 90% claim made several times in literature on Robin Hood hash tables. In my experience, the claim is a bit exaggerated, although I suppose it depends on what our idea of “good performance” is. See these benchmarks, which again go up to a maximum load factor of 0.95 (Although boost and Absl forcibly grow/rehash at 0.85-0.9):
https://strong-starlight-4ea0ed.netlify.app/
Tsl, Martinus, and CC are all Robin Hood tables (https://github.com/Tessil/robin-map, https://github.com/martinus/robin-hood-hashing, and https://github.com/JacksonAllan/CC, respectively). Absl and Boost are the well-known SIMD-based hash tables. Khash (https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib/blob/master/khash.h) is, I think, an ordinary open-addressing table using quadratic probing. Fastmap is a new, yet-to-be-published design that is fundamentally similar to bytell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2fKMP47slQ) but also incorporates some aspects of the aforementioned SIMD maps (it caches a 4-bit fragment of the hash code to avoid most key comparisons).
As you can see, all the Robin Hood maps spike upwards dramatically as the load factor gets high, becoming as much as 5-6 times slower at 0.95 vs 0.5 in one of the benchmarks (uint64_t key, 256-bit struct value: Total time to erase 1000 existing elements with N elements in map). Only the SIMD maps (with Boost being the better performer) and Fastmap appear mostly immune to load factor in all benchmarks, although the SIMD maps do - I believe - use tombstones for deletion.
I’ve only read briefly about bi-directional linear probing – never experimented with it.

Collections-C

2 2,715 7.6 C

A library of generic data structures for the C language.
WorkOS

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sc

17 2,163 6.3 C

Common libraries and data structures for C.

Project mention: A simple hash table in C | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-06-13

ctl

22 158 5.9 C

My variant of the C Template Library (by rurban)

Project mention: A header-only C implementation of C++ <algorithm> | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-07-03

Well, I do like mine better, which is closer to the STL, and for all containers. https://github.com/rurban/ctl/

diskhash

0 154 0.0 C

Diskbased (persistent) hashtable
hatrack

1 79 4.0 C

Fast, multi-reader, multi-writer, lockless data structures for parallel programming
Harbol

1 25 6.2 C

Harbol is a collection of data structure and miscellaneous libraries, similar in nature to C++'s Boost, STL, and GNOME's GLib but for C99+ (by assyrianic)
InfluxDB

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TableC

3 23 5.9 C

Low-level C89 Closed/Open-addressed hashtable implementation.
Generic-C-DataStructures

3 1 4.3 C

A repository for code I wrote while learning to implement generic data structures in C

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).