Again it depends a lot on the usage pattern. If you're going to be dereferencing a pointer off to some allocated-elsewhere object on every little operation or c

Again it depends a lot on the usage pattern. If you're going to be dereferencing a pointer off to some allocated-elsewhere object on every little operation or comparison then sure. But if there are sorts or searches or other operations that can take place against a fixed-size "index" object, then it may still make sense to have a vector-like or pre-allocated pool of those objects and only pay the cache hit cost when you do major operations on a particular instance. Which is really just the cache doing its job. The linked-list anti-pattern is when you're constantly paging in big speculative chunks of memory only to access a single pointer and then move on.