I don't know if you'd call him a theorist, but I think this gentleman maintains GHashTable and I found his posts comparing/benchmarking widely used hash tables

I don't know if you'd call him a theorist, but I think this gentleman maintains GHashTable and I found his posts comparing/benchmarking widely used hash tables really informative and entertaining: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2018/07/24/a-hash-table-re-hash/ https://hpjansson.org/blag/2018/07/24/a-hash-table-re-hash/