[Sesse__]

The absl tables (the canonical Swisstables) are good, but not the fastest. Of course, everything will depend on your hardware, compiler and usage patterns, but if you look at an all-round benchmark like https://martin.ankerl.com/2022/08/27/hashmap-bench-01/, they're about in the middle of the pack even when picking the best-working hash functions (and really bad if you happen to have a bad one). This mirrors my own experience.

Of course, absl tables will have been improved since 2022, but there are many competitors that have improved as well. And you could argue “well, who ever copies or iterates over a map”, but even if you take away those categories, they're not a clear leader really anywhere else either.

[vlovich123]

I wouldn’t say it’s the middle of the pack. They’re very clearly in the front of the pack for most operations but the summarization of the author penalizes it’s weaknesses more than of others because they have a horse in the race.

[spacechild1]

It's worth mentioning that boost.unordered now also has a state-of-the-art open adressing hashtable (boost::unordered_flat_map) that beats abseil in some benchmarks, particularly for unsuccessful look-up: https://bannalia.blogspot.com/2022/11/inside-boostunorderedf...

[camel-cdr]

absl::flat_hash_map performs quite well on the slight more "realistic" benchmarks that were added to ankerls map_benchmark after the article came out (GameOfLife and knucleotide). See this slide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg8MZ5pJIJA&t=1996s (the talks is also great btw)