How to go about creating a Hashmap in C from scratch as is present in C++ STL?
What parameters would be taken into consideration and how would you test the hashmap? As in, what would the benchmark test cases be which you would run before you could say that your hashmap is complete?
Well if you know the basics behind them, it shouldn't be too hard.
Generally you create an array called "buckets" that contain the key and value, with an optional pointer to create a linked list.
When you access the hash table with a key, you process the key with a custom hash function which will return an integer. You then take the modulus of the result and that is the location of your array index or "bucket". Then you check the unhashed key with the stored key, and if it matches, then you found the right place.
Otherwise, you've had a "collision" and must crawl through the linked list and compare keys until you match. (note some implementations use a binary tree instead of linked list for collisions).
Check out this fast hash table implementation:
The best approach depends on the expected key distribution and number of collisions. If relatively few collisions are expected, it really doesn't matter which method is used. If lots of collisions are expected, then which to use depends on the cost of rehashing or probing vs. manipulating the extensible bucket data structure.
But here is source code example of An Hashmap Implementation in C
There are other mechanisms to handle overflow than the simple minded linked list of overflow entries which e.g. wastes a lot of memory.
Which mechanism to use depends among other things on if you can choose the hash function and possible pick more than one (to implement e.g. double hashing to handle collisions); if you expect to often add items or if the map is static once filled; if you intend to remove items or not; ...
The best way to implement this is to first think about all these parameters and then not code it yourself but to pick a mature existing implementation. Google has a few good implementations -- e.g. http://code.google.com/p/google-sparsehash/
