Why not allow an external interface to provide hashCode/equals for a HashMap?

Question

With a TreeMap it\'s trivial to provide a custom Comparator, thus overriding the semantics provided by Comparable objects added to the

Answer 1

I suspect this has not been done because it would prevent hashCode caching?

I attempted creating a generic Map solution where all keys are silently wrapped. It turned out that the wrapper would have to hold the wrapped object, the cached hashCode and a reference to the callback interface responsible for equality-checks. This is obviously not as efficient as using a wrapper class, where you'd only have to cache the original key plus one more object (see hazzens answer).

(I also bumped into a problem related to generics; the get-method accepts Object as input, so the callback interface responsible for hashing would have to perform an additional instanceof-check. Either that, or the map class would have to know the Class of its keys.)

Answer 2

HashingStrategy is the concept you're looking for. It's a strategy interface that allows you to define custom implementations of equals and hashcode.

public interface HashingStrategy<E>
{
    int computeHashCode(E object);
    boolean equals(E object1, E object2);
}

You can't use a HashingStrategy with the built in HashSet or HashMap. GS Collections includes a java.util.Set called UnifiedSetWithHashingStrategy and a java.util.Map called UnifiedMapWithHashingStrategy.

Let's look at an example.

public class Data
{
    private final int id;

    public Data(int id)
    {
        this.id = id;
    }

    public int getId()
    {
        return id;
    }

    // No equals or hashcode
}

Here's how you might set up a UnifiedSetWithHashingStrategy and use it.

java.util.Set<Data> set =
  new UnifiedSetWithHashingStrategy<>(HashingStrategies.fromFunction(Data::getId));
Assert.assertTrue(set.add(new Data(1)));

// contains returns true even without hashcode and equals
Assert.assertTrue(set.contains(new Data(1)));

// Second call to add() doesn't do anything and returns false
Assert.assertFalse(set.add(new Data(1)));

Why not just use a Map? UnifiedSetWithHashingStrategy uses half the memory of a UnifiedMap, and one quarter the memory of a HashMap. And sometimes you don't have a convenient key and have to create a synthetic one, like a tuple. That can waste more memory.

How do we perform lookups? Remember that Sets have contains(), but not get(). UnifiedSetWithHashingStrategy implements Pool in addition to Set, so it also implements a form of get().

Here's a simple approach to handle case-insensitive Strings.

UnifiedSetWithHashingStrategy<String> set = 
  new UnifiedSetWithHashingStrategy<>(HashingStrategies.fromFunction(String::toLowerCase));
set.add("ABC");
Assert.assertTrue(set.contains("ABC"));
Assert.assertTrue(set.contains("abc"));
Assert.assertFalse(set.contains("def"));
Assert.assertEquals("ABC", set.get("aBc"));

This shows off the API, but it's not appropriate for production. The problem is that the HashingStrategy constantly delegates to String.toLowerCase() which creates a bunch of garbage Strings. Here's how you can create an efficient hashing strategy for case-insensitive Strings.

public static final HashingStrategy<String> CASE_INSENSITIVE =
  new HashingStrategy<String>()
  {
    @Override
    public int computeHashCode(String string)
    {
      int hashCode = 0;
      for (int i = 0; i < string.length(); i++)
      {
        hashCode = 31 * hashCode + Character.toLowerCase(string.charAt(i));
      }
      return hashCode;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean equals(String string1, String string2)
    {
      return string1.equalsIgnoreCase(string2);
    }
  };

Note: I am a developer on GS collections.

Answer 3

.NET has this via IEqualityComparer (for a type which can compare two objects) and IEquatable (for a type which can compare itself to another instance).

In fact, I believe it was a mistake to define equality and hashcodes in java.lang.Object or System.Object at all. Equality in particular is hard to define in a way which makes sense with inheritance. I keep meaning to blog about this...

But yes, basically the idea is sound.