I should preface this by saying I love functional programming, I think it's a great way to write stable and testable code, it's likely the future, but... Funct

I should preface this by saying I love functional programming, I think it's a great way to write stable and testable code, it's likely the future, but... Functional programming is much more popular in academic circles than in industry. I think academics tend to hand wave away practical concerns like cache coherency as "an implementation detail" or as an "exercise for the reader." Big O times are often considered, but rarely do researchers make a career off of "how well does this fit into an X86 L3 cache" So yes, functional programming tends to depend on linked lists, and that's probably why you don't see it in things like the game industry. This might change in the future, for instance, I could see it being the case where having provably immutable memory could allow processors to manage more memory efficiently, but I don't think you can have a fast language that considers the CPU as an abstract entity; you have to design these things in.