I wrote a python library that would build a perfect hash at run-time, it was basically the stupidest way you could do it - it would shell out to gperf to build

I wrote a python library that would build a perfect hash at run-time, it was basically the stupidest way you could do it - it would shell out to gperf to build the library, compile it to a shared library, then link the entry points in (I think with ctypes? I can't remember). It was just for fun, but in the end even ignoring the startup costs of all of that, the default performance of python's dictionary was better.