Despite the new hash table’s unprecedented efficiency, no one is likely to try building it anytime soon. It’s just too complicated to construct. “An algorithm that is fast in theory is not necessarily fast in practice”

It’s not unusual for such gaps between theory and practice to persist for a long while, Kuszmaul said, because theorists tend to ignore constant factors. The time it takes to perform an operation is typically multiplied by a number, some constant whose exact value may be immaterial from a theoretical standpoint. “But in practice, constants really matter,” he said. “In the real world, a factor of 10 is a game ender.”

So currently we’re still in the frictionless spherical cows realm