I sort of grasp the idea of a hash table. It's nothing I've ever really looked into as of yet. But here's my current situation. I'm porting the Chipmunk physics engine over to C# from C and everything is turning out pretty good. My only concern is that Scott (the original author) wrote up a custom HashSet structure and SpaceHash structure. These structures make heavy use of pointer manipulation of (what will be in my port) classes and structs. I'd like to avoid as much of that as possible as it's likely to be a spot where I miss something.

So I went looking and found System.Collections.Hashtable and was wondering if this could possibly compare to the HashSet structure Scott wrote. I'm pretty sure I'll have to wrap around it at least for the SpaceHash, but is his HashSet similar to the Hashtable? If anyone who knows C could take a look at his source I'd greatly appreciate the help and insight.