C++ – Compile time string hashing

cc++11hashmetaprogramming

I have read in few different places that using C++11's new string literals it might be possible to compute a string's hash at compile time. However, no one seems to be ready to come out and say that it will be possible or how it would be done.

  • Is this possible?
  • What would the operator look like?

I'm particularly interested use cases like this.

void foo( const std::string& value )
{
   switch( std::hash(value) )
   {
      case "one"_hash: one(); break;
      case "two"_hash: two(); break;
      /*many more cases*/
      default: other(); break;
   }
}

Note: the compile time hash function doesn't have to look exactly as I've written it. I did my best to guess what the final solution would look like, but meta_hash<"string"_meta>::value could also be a viable solution.

Best Answer

This is a little bit late, but I succeeded in implementing a compile-time CRC32 function with the use of constexpr. The problem with it is that at the time of writing, it only works with GCC and not MSVC nor Intel compiler.

Here is the code snippet:

// CRC32 Table (zlib polynomial)
static constexpr uint32_t crc_table[256] = {
    0x00000000L, 0x77073096L, 0xee0e612cL, 0x990951baL, 0x076dc419L,
    0x706af48fL, 0xe963a535L, 0x9e6495a3L, 0x0edb8832L, 0x79dcb8a4L,
    0xe0d5e91eL, 0x97d2d988L, 0x09b64c2bL, 0x7eb17cbdL, 0xe7b82d07L,
...
};
template<size_t idx>
constexpr uint32_t crc32(const char * str)
{
    return (crc32<idx-1>(str) >> 8) ^ crc_table[(crc32<idx-1>(str) ^ str[idx]) & 0x000000FF];
}

// This is the stop-recursion function
template<>
constexpr uint32_t crc32<size_t(-1)>(const char * str)
{
    return 0xFFFFFFFF;
}

// This doesn't take into account the nul char
#define COMPILE_TIME_CRC32_STR(x) (crc32<sizeof(x) - 2>(x) ^ 0xFFFFFFFF)

enum TestEnum
{
    CrcVal01 = COMPILE_TIME_CRC32_STR("stack-overflow"),
};

CrcVal01 is equal to 0x335CC04A

Hope this will help you!

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