[moonchild]

> the equality test will start with the first byte

I would expect the equality test to compare at least a full word at a time, just as the hash hashes at least a full word at a time.

[manwe150]

I didn’t look at their implementation, but in general, strings don’t have to be aligned so you can only peek one byte at a time looking for the end, besides not wanting to annoy valgrind and other similar UB detection tools by reading past the end of the string.

[moonchild]

Strawman; nul-terminated strings are horribly slow for nearly every application. Hence I assume (especially given that they are using c++) that they are using length-accompanied strings rather than nul-terminated ones.