Hashcode is not used for identity and is explicitly not intended for this and never was. The whole point of this article is that the modern default implementati

Hashcode is not used for identity and is explicitly not intended for this and never was. The whole point of this article is that the modern default implementation does not even rely on object identity anymore (it used to). Java has object identity of course. Most good equals implementations rely on that to figure out if the object is being compared to itself before running more expensive operations do field by field comparison. Collisions are a good thing actually if you are implementing a hash table. Otherwise you end up with one bucket per object; which does not scale very well. The reason hashcode can be overridden is so you can have some control over these collisions if you need to.