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Taking over siphashc for Python

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Michal Čihař
BlogDevelopment
24 Aug 2017

Since some time we're using siphash algorithm to speed up looking up strings in Weblate. Even though it is used by Python internally, it's not exposed in the standard library so several third party modules appeared in the PyPI. Out of all these siphashc or rather it's Python 3 fork siphashc3 seemed to perform best, so I've started to use that.

However it turned out that none of them is in active maintenance anymore. The original version lacks Python 3 support, while the siphashc3 uses odd versioning which causes problems to some pip versions.

After trying to get fix into siphashc3 without much of success, I've spoken to original author of siphashc and he has agreed to hand over maintainership to me. So it's new home is at https://github.com/WeblateOrg/siphashc and new release is already available on PyPI.

Note: Originally we were using MD5 in Weblate, but siphash has shown to be faster and fits into 64-bits, what makes it easier to store and index in SQL databases as LONGINT.

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