cityhash issue with windows

[adriaanph]

it's not possible to install cityhash under windows, unless one makes a few minor code modifications to it.
see
tensorflow/datasets#690
escherba/python-cityhash#25

unfortunately the cityhash maintainer doesn't seem to want to incorporate the required changes.

could you look into replacing cityhash with an alternative, perhaps like the tensorflow team, siphash / siphashc / csiphash?

[bmerry]

Does xxhash work on Windows? We added cityhash as a dependency because Dask needs some package for efficiently hashing arrays (otherwise it uses a very slow fallback), but Dask also supports xxhash, and if one uses the latest of everything then xxhash should will in future be faster too (dask/dask#7086).

[adriaanph]

yes, seems to work fine (windows 10, python 3.9).

[bmerry]

My suggestion is that for now we should just change the dependency on cityhash to exclude Windows, and you can install xxhash instead if you find that things are slow.