[ajross]

Good grief. Why the sarcasm? Again I'm seeing a deliberate attempt to interpret an insane absolutist stance from what is actually (if you read it and not the headling) a well-considered argument. Linked list traversal can be slow, and they can be slow in ways that (again, if you read the article) you probably find surprising. Does that mean that some special applications (like malloc) can't find a user for them? Of course not.

But to respond to the technical point: the malloc case is very special. Free memory is by definition unused and probably cache-cold, so there's little value in improving the locality of reference. And it's "already memory", so there is no value in trying to put it into a "container" when you can just drop the link pointers right into the buffer. So your'e right, but in a specious way that is still missing the point of the linked article.