About Tychosoft Rusty Hash

The purpose of this package is to introduce consistent hashing in Rust that is consistent with my other implementations in use in other languages. Consistent hashing is foundational to distributed computing and specialized data practices such as dynamic node assignment for distributed caches and dynamic load balancing, table sharding, etc.

Consistent hashing also has to be implemented consistently regardless of system platform (endianness) or language. You do not want a service that runs on a different endian architecture or that is written in another language to select nodes differently.

I focus on two things in this library; a generic consistent hasher for reducing hash digests to 64 bit values using the top 8 bytes of a hash digest in big endian (network) byte order, and a hash ring which is often used to distribute services to keys. The latter must have identical behavior, especially around vnodes and ring collissions. This implementation matches the C++ reference implimentation in ModernCLI, and my go services implimentation at https://gitlab.com/tychosoft/service

Distributions

The primary means to distribute rusty hash is as a mozilla crate and the latest release should be made available thru the mozilla crate site. A stand-alone detached source tarball may also be produced from a repository checkout.