Lua support for compile-time Jenkins hashes

In GTA/RAGE games, you’ll often encounter native functions either taking or returning a Jenkins one-at-a-time hash, like the ones returned by GET_HASH_KEY.

Traditionally, code would have had to either hardcode hashes (like -1044093321), or use GET_HASH_KEY directly (like GetHashKey("a_m_y_skater_01")). This would have lead to either less readability and maintainability, or having to wait for a slow native invocation.

Starting in releases of FiveM/FXServer shipping within the next week, CfxLua has gained support for a new string literal: the backtick string — ``. Now, you’ll have an alternative to the former two, that will still be readable, and will be replaced with a hash during Lua compilation time: `a_m_y_skater_01`.

Let’s look at a real-world example:

    while true do

        local f = 0
        local ped = PlayerPedId()

        for i = 1, 10000 do
            if GetEntityModel(ped) == `a_m_y_skater_01` then
                f = f + 1


This Lua code runs at around 18 milliseconds per tick on our testing system. The old-style equivalent would’ve run a lot worse – replacing the `a_m_y_skater_01` part with GetHashKey('a_m_y_skater_01') results in a tick time of 43 milliseconds on the same system – more than twice as slow!