On: Reasons to Prefer Blake3 over Sha256

[richardwhiuk]

If you want a fast hash function (and don't care about it's cryptographic properties), don't use a cryptographic hash function.

[dralley → richardwhiuk]

BLAKE3 is actually competitive with non-cryptographic hashes like crc32.

[RaisingSpear → dralley]

Not even close. CRC32 can easily run at >50GB/s single thread on this i7-12700K CPU (VPCLMULQDQ implementation). The BLAKE3 page claims around 7GB/s single thread. Fudging the figures a bit to cater to CPU differences, BLAKE3 is still a far cry from CRC32.

[dralley → RaisingSpear]

You're referring to the implementation that was on HN a month or two ago?

There's nothing wrong with that, it's a fair comparison, but I'm talking about the existing common implementations.

[oconnor663 → dralley]

To be fair, it really depends on the platform. There's an argument to be made that platforms where you care about the difference are specifically the ones where BLAKE3 is slower (no SIMD, no threads).

[dralley → oconnor663]

Fair