Hashing reflect.Type - go

Question

I'm trying to find a quick way of performing comparisons between two []reflect.Type. Right now I have the following:
func Equal(left, right []reflect.Type) bool {
if len(left) != len(right) {
return false
}
for i := 0; i < len(left); i++ {
if left[i] != right[i] {
return false
}
}
return true
}
Most of the slices don't change. So if I can find a way to hash them, I'd get a huge perf boost.
Background
I'm trying to (for fun) implement a form of function overloading in Go using the reflect package. The first thing I did is to convert each specialised/overloaded function into a signature type.
type Signature struct {
Variadic bool
In, Out []reflect.Type
}
The idea is that, when the overloaded function gets called, I'll convert the arguments into a slice of reflect.Type and then find a Signature where the In types match.
This works, but for each comparison, it's a linear scan which is pretty slow. If I could hash the slice of []reflect.Type I could stick that in a map and get constant time lookups.

Answer 1

I ended up abusing the built-in map to assign unique ids to each reflect.Type. Then I hash those using djb2.
type TypeCode struct {
seq int64
codes map[reflect.Type]int64
}
func (td *TypeCode) TypeID(t reflect.Type) int64 {
if code, ok := td.codes[t]; ok {
return code
}
td.seq++
td.codes[t] = td.seq
return td.seq
}
func (td *TypeCode) SliceTypeID(tt []reflect.Type) int64 {
id := int64(5381)
for _, t := range tt {
id = ((id << 5) + id) + td.TypeID(t)
}
return id
}
edit: I switched to a string based approach which is less efficient, but removes any potential for collisions.
type TypeCode struct {
seq int64
codes map[reflect.Type]string
}
func (td *TypeCode) TypeID(t reflect.Type) string {
if code, ok := td.codes[t]; ok {
return code
}
td.seq++
id := strconv.FormatInt(td.seq, 10)
td.codes[t] = id
return id
}
func (td *TypeCode) SliceTypeID(tt []reflect.Type) string {
ids := make([]string, len(tt))
for i := 0; i < len(tt); i++ {
ids[i] = td.TypeID(tt[i])
}
return strings.Join(ids, ".")
}