What is the reason behind Enum.hashCode()?

Question

The method hashCode() in class Enum is final and defined as super.hashCode(), which means it returns a number based on the address of the instance, which is a random number from programmers POV.

Defining it e.g. as ordinal() ^ getClass().getName().hashCode() would be deterministic across different JVMs. It would even work a bit better, since the least significant bits would "change as much as possible", e.g., for an enum containing up to 16 elements and a HashMap of size 16, there'd be for sure no collisions (sure, using an EnumMap is better, but sometimes not possible, e.g. there's no ConcurrentEnumMap). With the current definition you have no such guarantee, have you?

Summary of the answers

Using Object.hashCode() compares to a nicer hashCode like the one above as follows:

• PROS
  • simplicity
• CONTRAS
  • speed
  • more collisions (for any size of a HashMap)
  • non-determinism, which propagates to other objects making them unusable for
    • deterministic simulations
    • ETag computation
    • hunting down bugs depending e.g. on a HashSet iteration order

I'd personally prefer the nicer hashCode, but IMHO no reason weights much, maybe except for the speed.

UPDATE

I was curious about the speed and wrote a benchmark with surprising results. For a price of a single field per class you can a deterministic hash code which is nearly four times faster. Storing the hash code in each field would be even faster, although negligibly.

The explanation why the standard hash code is not much faster is that it can't be the object's address as objects gets moved by the GC.

UPDATE 2

There are some strange things going on with the hashCode performance in general. When I understand them, there's still the open question, why System.identityHashCode (reading from the object header) is way slower than accessing a normal object field.

Answer 1

I've asked the same question, because did not saw this one. Why in Enum hashCode() refers to the Object hashCode() implementaion, instead of ordinal() function?

I encountered it as a sort of a problem, when defining my own hash function, for an Object relying on enum hashCode as one of the composites. When checking a value in a Set of Objects, returned by the function, I checked them in an order, which I would expect it to be the same, since the hashCode I define myself, and so I expect elements to fall at the same nodes on the tree, but since hashCode returned by enum changes from start to start, this assumption was wrong, and test could fail once in a while.

So, when I figured out the problem, I started using ordinal instead. I am not sure everyone writing hashCode for their Object realize this.

So basically, you can't define your own deterministic hashCode, while relying on enum hashCode, and you need to use ordinal instead

P.S. This was too big for a comment :)

Answer 2

I think that the reason they made it final is to avoid developers shooting themselves in the foot by rewriting a suboptimal (or even incorrect) hashCode.

Regarding the chosen implementation: it's not stable across JVMs, but it's very fast, avoid collisions, and doesn't need an additional field in the enum. Given the normally small number of instances of an enum class, and the speed of the equals method, I wouldn't be surprised if the HashMap lookup time was bigger with your algorithm than with the current one, due to its additional complexity.

Answer 3

The only reason for using Object's hashCode() and for making it final I can imagine, is to make me ask this question.

First of all, you should not rely on such mechanisms for sharing objects between JVMs. That's simply not a supported use case. When you serialize / deserialize you should rely on your own comparison mechanisms or only "compare" the results against objects within your own JVM.

The reason for letting enums hashCode be implemented as Objects hash code (based on identity) is because, within one JVM there will only be one instance of each enum object. This is enough to ensure that such implementation makes sense and is correct.

You could argue like "Hey, String and the wrappers for the primitives (Long, Integer, ...) all have well defined, deterministic, specifications of hashCode! Why doesn't the enums have it?", Well, to begin with, you can have several distinct string references representing the same string which means that using super.hashCode would be an error, so these classes necessarily need their own hashCode implementations. For these core classes it made sense to let them have well-defined deterministic hashCodes.

Why did they choose to solve it like this?

Well, look at the requirements of the hashCode implementation. The main concern is to make sure that each object should return a distinct hash code (unless it is equal to another object). The identity-based approach is super efficient and guarantees this, while your suggestion does not. This requirement is apparently stronger than any "convenience bonus" about easing up on serialization etc.

Answer 4

The JVM enforces that for an enum constant, only one object will exist in memory. There is no way that you could end up with two different instance objects of the same enum constant within a single VM, not with reflection, not across the network via serialization/deserialization.

That being said, since it is the only object to represent this constant, it doesn't matter that its hascode is its address since no other object can occupy the same address space at the same time. It is guaranteed to be unique & "deterministic" (in the sense that in the same VM, in memory, all objects will have the same reference, no matter what it is).

Answer 5

One more reason that it is implemented like this I could imagine is because of the requirement for hashCode() and equals() to be consistent, and for the design goal of Enums that they sould be simple to use and compile-time constant (to use them is "case" constants). This also makes it legal to compare enum instances with "==", and you simply wouldn't want "equals" to behave differntly from "==" for enums. This again ties hashCode to the default Object.hashCode() reference-based behavior. As said before, I also don't expect equals() and hashCode() to consider two enum constants from different JVM as being equal. When talking about serialization: For instance fields typed as enums the default binary serializer in Java has a special behaviour that serializess only the name of the constant, and on deserialization the reference to the corresponding enum value in the de-serializing JVM is re-created. JAXB and other XML-based serialization mechanisms work in a similar way. So: just don't worry

Answer 6

There is no requirement for hash codes to be deterministic between JVMs and no advantage gained if they were. If you are relying on this fact you are using them wrong.

As only one instance of each enum value exists, Object.hashcode() is guaranteed never to collide, is good code reuse and is very fast.

If equality is defined by identity, then Object.hashcode() will always give the best performance.

The determinism of other hash codes is just a side effect of their implementation. As their equality is usually defined by field values, mixing in non-deterministic values would be a waste of time.