great video
You'll like this video. This guy uses lots of optimization techniques to get a PHT that runs more than twice as fast as the gperf one (the best one he found that isn't specifically constructed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQ_HcNSOAI
Discussion
what I'm proposing should be way faster than anything in this video, because in a *minimal* perfect hashtable I don't even need to do a compare in many cases, since if the word is out of the range it can be rejected outright.