That's not what he said, and his solution is not "inefficient." CPUs have no emotions; if it runs faster due to cache, it's simply the better solution. For the

That's not what he said, and his solution is not "inefficient." CPUs have no emotions; if it runs faster due to cache, it's simply the better solution. For the use case required by ZeroMQ, it's faster in all cases, because swap-with-last and shrink is O(1). Sure, if CPUs didn't have caches, a list might be faster. Do you see where this is going? The C way of solving problems consists of adding one more level of indirection (ever heard of 3-star C programmers?), because it becomes more efficient asymptotically that way. Nevermind the hidden factor of 100-1000 due to pipeline stalls and cache misses. Fortunately not all C programmers think that way.