rBloom

A fast, simple and lightweight Bloom filter library for Python, implemented in Rust. It's designed to be as pythonic as possible, mimicking the built-in set type where it can, and works with any hashable object. While it's a new library (this project was started in 2023), it's currently the fastest option for Python by a long shot (see the section Benchmarks). Releases are published on PyPI.

Quickstart

This library defines only one class, which can be used as follows:

>>> from rbloom import Bloom
>>> bf = Bloom(200, 0.01)  # 200 items max, false positive rate of 1%
>>> bf.add("hello")
>>> "hello" in bf
True
>>> "world" in bf
False
>>> bf.update(["hello", "world"])  # "hello" and "world" now in bf
>>> other_bf = Bloom(200, 0.01)

### add some items to other_bf

>>> third_bf = bf | other_bf    # third_bf now contains all items in
                                # bf and other_bf
>>> third_bf = bf.copy()
... third_bf.update(other_bf)   # same as above
>>> bf.issubset(third_bf)    # bf <= third_bf also works
True

For the full API, see the section Documentation.

Installation

On almost all platforms, simply run:

pip install rbloom

If you're on an uncommon platform, this may cause pip to build the library from source, which requires the Rust toolchain. You can also build rbloom by cloning this repository and running maturin:

maturin build --release

This will create a wheel in the target/wheels/ directory, which can subsequently also be passed to pip.

Why rBloom?

Why should you use this library instead of one of the other Bloom filter libraries on PyPI?

• Simple: Almost all important methods work exactly like their counterparts in the built-in set type.
• Fast: rbloom is implemented in Rust, which makes it blazingly fast. See section Benchmarks for more information.
• Lightweight: rbloom has no dependencies of its own.
• Maintainable: This library is very concise, and it's written in idiomatic Rust. Even if I were to stop maintaining rbloom (which I don't intend to), it would be trivially easy for you to fork it and keep it working for you.

I started rbloom because I was looking for a simple Bloom filter dependency for a project, and the only sufficiently fast option (pybloomfiltermmap3) was segfaulting on recent Python versions. rbloom ended up being twice as fast and has grown to encompass a more complete API (e.g. with set comparisons like issubset). Do note that it doesn't use mmapped files, however. This shouldn't be an issue in most cases, as the random access heavy nature of a Bloom filter negates the benefits of mmap after very few operations, but it is something to keep in mind for edge cases.

Benchmarks

I implemented the following simple benchmark in the respective API of each library:

bf = Bloom(10_000_000, 0.01)

for i in range(10_000_000):
    bf.add(i + 0.5)  # floats because ints are hashed as themselves

for i in range(10_000_000):
    assert i + 0.5 in bf

This resulted in the following runtimes:

Library	Time	Notes
rBloom	5.956 s	works out-of-the-box
pybloomfiltermmap3	11.280 s	surprisingly hard to get working [1]
pybloom3	75.871 s	works out-of-the-box
Flor	128.837 s	doesn't work on arbitrary objects [2]
bloom-filter2	325.044 s	doesn't work on arbitrary objects [2]

[1] It refused to install on Python 3.11 and kept segfaulting on 3.10 (on Linux as of January 2023), so I installed 3.7 on my machine for this benchmark.
[2] I tested both converting to bytes and pickling, and chose the faster time.

The benchmark was run on a 2019 Dell XPS 15 7590 with an Intel Core i5-9300H. It was run 5 times for each library, and the average time was used.

Also note that rbloom is compiled against a stable ABI for portability, and that you can get a small but measurable speedup by removing the "abi3-py37" flag from Cargo.toml and building it yourself.

Documentation

This library defines only one class, the signature of which should be thought of as follows. Note that only the first few methods differ from the built-in set type:

class Bloom:

    # expected_items:  max number of items to be added to the filter
    # false_positive_rate:  max false positive rate of the filter
    # hash_func:  optional argument, see section "Cryptographic security"
    def __init__(self, expected_items: int, false_positive_rate: float,
                 hash_func=__builtins__.hash)

    @property
    def size_in_bits(self) -> int      # number of buckets in the filter

    @property
    def hash_func(self) -> Callable[[Any], int]   # retrieve the hash_func
                                                  # given to __init__

    @property
    def approx_items(self) -> float    # estimated number of items in
                                       # the filter

    @classmethod
    def load(cls, filepath: str, hash_func) -> Bloom      # see "Persistence"

    def save(self, filepath: str)                 # see section "Persistence"

    #####################################################################
    #                    ALL SUBSEQUENT METHODS ARE                     #
    #              EQUIVALENT TO THE CORRESPONDING METHODS              #
    #                     OF THE BUILT-IN SET TYPE                      #
    #####################################################################

    def add(self, obj)                            # add obj to self
    def __contains__(self, obj) -> bool           # check if obj in self
    def __bool__(self) -> bool                    # False if empty
    def __repr__(self) -> str                     # basic info

    def __or__(self, other: Bloom) -> Bloom       # self | other
    def __ior__(self, other: Bloom)               # self |= other
    def __and__(self, other: Bloom) -> Bloom      # self & other
    def __iand__(self, other: Bloom)              # self &= other

    # these extend the functionality of __or__, __ior__, __and__, __iand__
    def union(self, *others: Union[Iterable, Bloom]) -> Bloom        # __or__
    def update(self, *others: Union[Iterable, Bloom])                # __ior__
    def intersection(self, *others: Union[Iterable, Bloom]) -> Bloom # __and__
    def intersection_update(self, *others: Union[Iterable, Bloom])   # __iand__

    # these implement <, >, <=, >=, ==, !=
    def __lt__, __gt__, __le__, __ge__, __eq__, __ne__(self,
                                                       other: Bloom) -> bool
    def issubset(self, other: Bloom) -> bool      # self <= other
    def issuperset(self, other: Bloom) -> bool    # self >= other

    def clear(self)                               # remove all items
    def copy(self) -> Bloom                       # duplicate self

To prevent death and destruction, the bitwise set operations only work on filters where all parameters are equal (including the hash functions being the exact same object). Because this is a Bloom filter, the __contains__ and approx_items methods are probabilistic, as are all the methods that compare two filters (such as __le__ and issubset).

Cryptographic security

Python's built-in hash function is designed to be fast, not maximally collision-resistant, so if your program depends on the false positive rate being perfectly correct, you may want to supply your own hash function. This is especially the case when working with very large filters (more than a few tens of millions of items) or when false positives are very costly and could be exploited by an adversary. Just make sure that your hash function returns an integer between -2^127 and 2^127 - 1. Feel free to use the following example in your own code:

from rbloom import Bloom
from hashlib import sha256
from pickle import dumps

def hash_func(obj):
    h = sha256(dumps(obj)).digest()
    return int.from_bytes(h[:16], "big") - 2**127

bf = Bloom(100_000_000, 0.01, hash_func)

When you throw away Python's built-in hash function and start hashing serialized representations of objects, however, you open up a breach into the scary realm of the unpythonic:

• Numbers like 1, 1.0, 1 + 0j and True will suddenly no longer be equal.
• Instances of classes with custom hashing logic (e.g. to stop caches inside instances from affecting their hashes) will suddenly display undefined behavior.
• Objects that can't be serialized simply won't be hashable at all.

Making you supply your own hash function in this case is a deliberate design decision intended to show you what you're doing and prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot.

Also note that using a custom hash will incur a performance penalty over using the built-in hash.

Persistence

The save and load methods allow you to save and load filters to and from disk. However, as the built-in hash function's salt changes between invocations of Python, they only work on filters with custom hash functions. Note that it is your responsibility to ensure that the hash function you supply to load is the same as the one originally used by the filter you're loading!

bf = Bloom(10_000, 0.01, some_hash_func)
bf.add("hello")
bf.add("world")

bf.save("bf.bloom")

loaded_bf = Bloom.load("bf.bloom", some_hash_func)
assert loaded_bf == bf

The size of the file is bf.size_in_bits / 8 + 8 bytes.

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Statement of attribution: Bloom filters were originally proposed in (Bloom, 1970). Furthermore, this implementation makes use of a constant recommended by (L'Ecuyer, 1999) for redistributing the entropy of a single hash over multiple integers using a linear congruential generator.