announcing PHast - fast to evaluate, minimal perfect hashing function

The ph crate from the BSuccinct package now includes the super-fast (about 1.01 cache misses per evaluation on average) Minimal Perfect Hash Function (MPHF) called PHast (Perfect Hashing made fast). MPHFs assign consecutive, unique numbers to objects of any (hashable) type (keys).

PHast can be about 1.9 bits/key and is described at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17918 (the paper contains benchmark results).

BSuccinct is an open source collection of (Rust) software focused on succinct data structures that are both space and time efficient. It is described in this paper.

See also my previous announcements regarding: ph and bsuccinct