until the attacker picks on your JSON parser or such, of course. Adding a balanced tree does not touch on average-case performance in any meaningful way, which

until the attacker picks on your JSON parser or such, of course. Adding a balanced tree does not touch on average-case performance in any meaningful way, which is why I'm advocating it. Everyone is using simple hashes for hash tables in order to get very good average-case performance. If you keep that fast hash function, and only go to a tree when getting pathological input, you'll be impervious. That was my meaning.