Hashing is a very useful tool that developers use every day—knowingly or unknowingly. Integer comparisons are fast, so checking the equality of two strings can be improved by comparing their hashes. Diverse keys can be made comparable by hashing—a method that is used in distributed databases to assign a partition to a row.
Modulo hashing is a technique that lets a distributed database assign a row to a partition deterministically. Hash the row's key, then use the modulo operator with the maximum number of partitions to receive a destination to store the row.
Earlier, we explored some hash functions (XOR-based and Adler 32), but we never compared them. Additionally, Rust's standard library offers a hash function (built for HashSet<K,V>/HashMap<K,V>, and implemented for all standard types), which is a good baseline.
First, histograms—to show how many occurrences each hash has. As mentioned before, the XOR-based approach yields a very strange...
