On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 5:15 PM, Alexander Kjeldaas <alexander.kjeldaas@gmail.com> wrote:

Assuming the Generic instance is a stable interface, I would create a traversal of that, feeding directly into a Blake2b-implementation (a fast SHA3 finalist, tweaked).

This gives you a cryptographically strong fingerprint, space usage is flexible (extract as many bytes as you want), is fast (~1GB/s), and with low complexity/external dependencies.

Alexander

Thank you for the reply. My own thinking has been along similar lines of finding a stable serialization for the record. Hashing is certainly a nice way to compress the result - one I've used myself in the past. However, can we really consider Generic a stable interface?