Yes, it's always best to reduce the number of variables in benchmarking, but the setup makes a big difference when we are talking about tiny data sets. I don't

Yes, it's always best to reduce the number of variables in benchmarking, but the setup makes a big difference when we are talking about tiny data sets. I don't know how to test it properly, but I tried looping over both the initialisation and a single search, and the hash sets were much slower, so much so that hash sets trailed lists by microseconds at size 10000. In retrospect, making those data structures unsurprisingly dominated running time and the test kind of lost all meaning. It was clear, however, that it wouldn't take many searches for the hash sets to win, search times for lists were going through the roof.