2 ms·

I’ve always wondered about whether you could have your cake and eat it too with linked lists where nodes are allocated in contiguous blocks of N nodes. So, the

• tsimionescu 4y ago
  That's quite likely to happen to a linked list when using a compacting GC (such as Java's or C#'s generational garbage collectors) (assuming the elements of the list are only reachable from the preceding element, not from many other places as well).
  • fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
    That depends on the GC’s traversal strategy, I think. If you assume that linked lists are implemented as in lisps (a pair of pointers), then if you traverse the head pointer before the tail pointer, the compacting GC will tend to spread the linked list out over time.