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.)