Proposal: Add the unordered-containers package and the hashable package to the Haskell Platform

[Thomas Schilling]

OK.  I think a reasonable approach would be the following:

 - add hashable-1.1 (ie., without SipHash) to the platform
 - later create a new release of hashable, that is fast by default and
provides SipHash functionality via a newtype wrapper (or it could be a
new package that defines the newtype and all the standard instances)

What's important is that the default behaviour (fast vs. secure) won't
change in a later version of the platform.

We should also make it clear that hashable (even with siphash) does
not aim to implement secure hashing. I.e., no replacement for proper
HMACs, SHA1, etc.


On 19 March 2013 16:51, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 8:41 AM, Thomas Schilling <nominolo at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On 19 March 2013 16:01, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/Proposals/unordered-containers
>>
>> The links to the repos are wrong.  It should be "tibbe" instead of
>> "tibbel".
>
>
> Fixed.
>
>>
>> Bryan's recent change to change "hashable" to use SipHash is certainly
>> the right default.  There were some complaints about performance for
>> use cases where security is not an issue. What are the options for
>> users that wish to use a different hash function?  According to the
>> paper, SipHash is about 2x slower than CityHash.
>
>
> 2x is *a lot*. 2x is about the performance difference between Map and
> HashMap. Since the raison d'etre for HashMap is that it's faster than Map,
> if we'd see a 2x slowdown in HashMap there would be little reason to use it.
>
> For example, 'delete' for HashMap ByteString got almost 2x slower with
> hashable-1.2. Since 'delete' does more than just hashing, that means that
> SipHash is quite a bit slower than the current (insecure) hash function.
> Another example: with GHC 7.6.2 HashMap String is almost unusable slow (5x
> slower than before). This is likely due to a GHC bug, but it's something we
> need to investigate. At the moment I don't encourage people to upgrade to
> hashable-1.2.0.5.
>
> The right way to go is probably to make this a user decision. Many
> applications (e.g. data processing) has no need for the security guarantee
> so paying for it makes little sense.
>
> Cheers,
>   Johan
>