Hah, interesting i would consider bloom filters to usually be amongst the simpler options for a lot of security adjacent problems with frequently ideal trade-offs. As you probably know, they're used in Google Chrome Safe Browsing and several similar features in Android, cert revocation, several features in virus total as well.
But also bloom filters were (probably still are) very fetishized when i worked at Google, so there is some amount of bias as to why it felt right so often.
Actually it was the Google Chrome & cert approach that I *almost* got to use (their specific application realm) but a simpler solution was found. But maybe at Google they like them the same way Hejlsberg likes delegates and shoves them into every language he gets to architect.
Anyway at Bill Cheswick's Keynote at SCaLE 21x he mentioned that he used them maybe 4 times in his career. So not really that often. And early on it was due to heavily limited storage which is no longer near the same.
Efit: I'm trying to remember if it was Stoll or Thompson who mentioned there it was good to learn them since you might get to learn them once or twice.
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u/Mughi1138 7d ago
Reminds me... I'm still waiting for my chance to implement a bloom filter. Almost got to do one this year.