> (that is actually the worst thing you could possibly do) Nonsense, there are many worse things you could do. For example, you could allocate nodes with mmap,

> (that is actually the worst thing you could possibly do) Nonsense, there are many worse things you could do. For example, you could allocate nodes with mmap, at 4KB per node. (Which is a thing I've actually done in the context of cursed bootstrap code where malloc isn't available and having more than a handful of (in that case doubly-linked-list) nodes means the environment is deranged anyway.)