alt Hacker NewsHashing everything based on the byte representation breaks when you have a type where equality does not imply byte equality. Such as… floats (+0 and -0 are equal, but have different byte representation).
Hashing everything based on the byte representation breaks when you have a type where equality does not imply byte equality. Such as… floats (+0 and -0 are equal, but have different byte representation).
Depends on the use-case, hashing can also be used for checking integrity/change in which case you exactly want the behavior that only bit-exact-equality is desired, even for arbitrary structs. Maybe that's somewhat niche, I mention it as I have such a use-case actually.