This blog post has two goals Investigate the {bench} package for timing R functions Consequently explore the different algorithms in the {digest} package using {bench} What is {digest}? The {digest} package provides a hash function to summarise R objects. Standard hashes are available, such as md5, crc32, sha-1, and sha-256. The key function in the package is digest() that applies a cryptographical hash function to arbitrary R objects. By default, the objects are internally serialized using md5.