In general I've found that people who have spent their whole careers writing just one kind of code tend to overgeneralize the lessons from that experience. If

In general I've found that people who have spent their whole careers writing just one kind of code tend to overgeneralize the lessons from that experience. If you spend all your time doing numerical physics simulations, indeed you probably don't see many occasions when a linked list would be a good choice. A compiler, though, is, by its nature, going to be crawling with them (as rayiner points out). It wouldn't make any sense to run a compiler on a SIMD GPU anyway -- it's far too full of conditional branches.