The quest for the fastest linked list

The quest for the fastest linked list

Linked lists are celebrity data structures of software development. They are celebrities because every engineer has had something to do with them in one part of their career. They are used in many places: from low-level memory management in operating systems up to data wrangling and data filtering in machine learning. They promise a lot:…

The price of dynamic memory: Memory Access

The price of dynamic memory: Memory Access

If your program uses dynamic memory, its speed will depend on allocation time but also on memory access time. Here we investigate how memory access time depends on the memory layout of your data structure. We also investigate ways to speed up your program by laying out your data structure optimally.