Nobody here is talking about vectors of integers. From the first post, this is all assuming that the objects in the vector are "big". A modern CPU has 200Gb/s

Nobody here is talking about vectors of integers. From the first post, this is all assuming that the objects in the vector are "big". A modern CPU has 200Gb/s of bandwidth. If the objects in your array are 200 Gb in size each, then swapping the position of two elements in a vector is going to take O(seconds) at memcpy speeds, while doing this with a linked list is going to take ~1 * 10^(-11) seconds. That's a performance difference of 11 orders of magnitude... You can make the objects in the array smaller (e.g. 200Mb each instead of 200Gb each) and your two-element swap would still be 10^8 times faster with a doubly linked list. --- In the parallel threads, people seem to just be arguing that a vector is always faster than a list, without understanding "why" this is the case, and making claims about "what the hardware does" without doing basic rule-of-thumb calculations to verify their claims.