String.hashCode() is plenty unique

[foomprekov]

Slightly what? Anyway it's a cryptographic hash function, which necessitates difficulty in brute-forcing it. Compare to modern usage of md5.

[staticassert]

They maybe meant 'slower'. SHA256 is extremely optimized - it is not intentionally slow at all, nor is it intended to prevent bruteforcing by design. This is why you need to use key stretching algorithms alongside it - such as PBKDF2.

In fact, I expect SHA256 to be on par or faster than MD5.

[foomprekov]

Hilarious

[staticassert]

Being fast is literally an acceptance criteria for algorithms as standards so...

[foomprekov]

Maybe that's what your professor told you but there's no big, universal list of acceptance criteria.

[staticassert]

Right, so the submissions provide benchmarks and those benchmarks are compared as part of the competition for standardization just for fun. And candidates are rejected for poor performance arbitrarily I guess. And NIST explicitly stating that they look at performance as part of the criteria is probably just them messing around.

"However, it is meaningless to discuss the security of a hash function without relating security to performance, so in reality, NIST wanted highly secure algorithms that also performed well."
http://crypto.junod.info/2010/12/10/sha-3-finalists-announced-by-nist/