a good example of this is Fibonacci heaps. on paper they're great, but they result in egregious pointer chasing, while radix heaps are less flexible but can be

a good example of this is Fibonacci heaps. on paper they're great, but they result in egregious pointer chasing, while radix heaps are less flexible but can be backed by a contiguous array. weirdly, in all my recent algorithm work, only the big-O has mattered (or it's all just NP-hard or even EXPTIME.)