Motivation

On a regular basis, I need a non-cryptographic hash calculated from a portion of a byte array. This byte array may end up becoming a string, but allocating a string just to throw it away for GetHashCode caused too much GC pressure and resulted in degraded performance. Additionally, GetHashCode produces only a 32bit hash

My requirements became:

• Must be able to operate on a leading subsequence of a byte array
• Must be able to produce a 64bit output
• Must produce a hash with a low chance of collision
• Must make zero heap allocations
• Must be fast for short subsequences (many of the strings I see are short)

At the time there was not a package on NuGet that satisified these requirements, so I ported farmhash to .NET.