Comment by btym

Ok, I got it. They're exactly the same. Either way you'd need to do a second search, because you're trying to differentiate between 3 states: "probably a match", "empty", or "deleted". A much better way than stealing a bit from the hash prefix is using a special value that represents "empty or deleted", and that's exactly what SwissTable does: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/256be563447a315f2a...