[fl0wenol]

Yeah but insofar as the article's author's revelation of how fast you can compile C code, maybe the correct answer is to use gperf?

If it's more dynamic than that I mean I guess it's cool to have a hash in a backing store that's dead simple.

But at sizes big enough and with enough dynamism that gperf or something similar isn't appropriate I think you should be considering dbm or SQLite, sort of by definition.