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How to write a Bloom filter in C++

blog.michaelschmatz.com

130 points by schmatz · 20 comments

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nly

I feel the use of vector<bool> is an iffy choice.

The Bitcoin codebase has a simple Bloom filter implementation you can take a look at that has been in use for some time

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/bloom.h

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/bloom.cpp

  • mavam

    What's wrong with vector<bool> (other than its name)? The interface is exactly what you need to implement a bit-level abstraction in a language where this isn't a first-class primitive.

  • bmohlenhoff

    std::bitset is also a good choice if the number of desired bits is known at compile time

    • schmatzOP

      I think this would probably be the best choice after templating the filter

nate_martin

This example works well for raw data but not for complex types. You could make the filter a template, taking the key and a "hasher" function as template args.

  • mavam

    Even better: N3980 [1]

    This proposal decouples the implementation of hash functions from how types get hashed.

    [1] http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n398...

  • schmatzOP

    Great suggestion; I wasn't sure the idiomatic way to template this, thanks for letting me know!

    • nate_martin

      Probably something like this:

      template< class Key, class Hash = std::hash<Key> > class BloomFilter;

      • bradleyjg

        I don't use c++ so I'm not sure how std:hash works or gets implemented, but the way that guava (Google's java library) does it is by passing in a key and a funnel object. The funnel object is essentially responsible for decomposing the object into a byte stream. The advantage of doing it this way rather than making the caller specify his own hash is that you can use murmurhash3 which you thought had the best properties for the bloom filter.

      • schmatzOP

        I updated the blog post with your suggestion; CDN should be updated soon :)

sokoloff

Learned something today. Thanks for the article.

Minor nit: it will save readers time if you call out that "p is the false positive error rate". (You reference the error rate, but don't attach a variable name to it.) I had to go to an external reference to figure that out, which meant I learned something else of course.

barsonme

Or in C[0] or in Go[1]...

[0] - https://github.com/EricLagergren/bloom [1] - https://github.com/EricLagergren/bloom-c

j_s

Is there a standard implementation "everybody uses"? Bloomd seems popular as a bloom filter server.

https://github.com/armon/bloomd

m00dy

I have also experiments about Bloom Filter in python https://github.com/erenyagdiran/BloomFilter

nvcken

How is your laptop spec ? please

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