Have a good hash function for a C++ hash table?

Question

I am in need of a performance-oriented hash function implementation in C++ for a hash table that I will be coding. I looked around already and only found questions asking wh

Answer 1

Since you store english words, most of your characters will be letters and there won't be much variation in the most significant two bits of your data. Besides of that I would keep it very simple, just using XOR. After all you're not looking for cryptographic strength but just for a reasonably even distribution. Something along these lines:

size_t hash(const std::string &data) {
  size_t h(0);
  for (int i=0; i> 26) ^ data[i];
  }
  return h;
}

Besides of that, have you looked at std::tr1::hash as a hashing function and/or std::tr1::unordered_map as an implementation of a hash table? Using these would probably be save much work opposed to implementing your own classes.