What happens if two different objects have the same hashcode?

Question

It is my understanding that two unequal objects can have the same hashcode. How would this be handled when adding or retrieving from a HashMap java?

Answer 1

They will just be added to the same bucket and equals() will be used to distinguish them. Each bucket can contain a list of objects with the same hash code.

In theory you can return the same integer as a hash code for any object of given class, but that would mean that you loose all performance benefits of the hash map and, in effect, will store objects in a list.