What? No. Hashing a string involves extra pointer chasing and looping over a variable-length data structure, and that's on top of the collision-chain resolution

What? No. Hashing a string involves extra pointer chasing and looping over a variable-length data structure, and that's on top of the collision-chain resolution the hash table itself has to do. In performance-sensitive code (like a dynamic language interpreter), it's far better to intern your strings and look them up by ID (i.e., pointer value) directly.