> yes, it can be implemented as a pointer at the end of the struct, but the extra latency of another pointer chasing can reduce performance For the latency to

> yes, it can be implemented as a pointer at the end of the struct, but the extra latency of another pointer chasing can reduce performance For the latency to be significant digits, there must be a lot of repeated calls which only read/write a very small number of elements in the array. Otherwise the accumulation of read/write operations performed when iterating over the data would dwarf the single pointer dereference. So I'm curious now-- do OS kernels spend most of their time doing lots of calls that dive into such dynamically-allocated data just to extract a single datum or two?