Its _it member keeps state about the current range. Although it's modified by the method, this is an implementation detail that irrelevant to the caller, hence mark the belongs_to_current_node method as const (and noexcept while at it). This allows the caller, cleanup_compaction, to use it from inside a const method, without having to mark its respective member as mutable too. Signed-off-by: Benny Halevy <bhalevy@scylladb.com> Closes #12634