51–60 of 131 posts
> Linked lists are taught as fundamental data structures in programming courses, but they are more commonly encountered in tech interviews than in real-world projects. I beg to disagree. In kernels, drivers, and embedded systems they are very common.
> Linked lists are taught as fundamental data structures in programming courses, but they are more commonly encountered in tech interviews than in real-world projects. I beg to disagree. In kernels, drivers, and embedded systems they are very common.
> Linked lists are taught as fundamental data structures in programming courses, but they are more commonly encountered in tech interviews than in real-world projects. I beg to disagree. In kernels, drivers, and embedded systems they are very common.
Why? Why would someone reach for a linked list in a kernel, driver, or embedded system?
> Linked lists are taught as fundamental data structures in programming courses, but they are more commonly encountered in tech interviews than in real-world projects. I beg to disagree. In kernels, drivers, and embedded systems they are very common.
Most people who take data structures courses or perform tech interviews don't end up working on kernels, drivers, or embedded systems though. To me, it sounds like the point being made is that there are a large number of programmers who have learned about linked lists but haven't run into many cases where they needed them in the world world, and I think it's accurate.
> Linked lists are taught as fundamental data structures in programming courses, but they are more commonly encountered in tech interviews than in real-world projects. I beg to disagree. In kernels, drivers, and embedded systems they are very common.
It strikes me the bottleneck for this problem isn't Vec or List, it's the serde_json Value type that needs to be used. This is useful for serializing/deserializing values into Rust types but if you're trying to validate JSON against a schema you don't actually need the JSON value data, just the types of the nodes (or more specifically, you only need some of the value data, and probably not much of it, so don't pay fo…
Another cool aspect of this and (if I understand correctly), where Rust really helps you is that you can explore multiple branches in parallel, since the linked list is immutable.
What if the linked list is cycled or doubly-linked?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that work? I don't follow how any runtime or compile-time optimization can solve the problem of locality for a linked list. If the data wasn't allocated sequentially, then it's simply not going to be sequential (unless you move it).
Instead of thinking of a linked list structurally, think of it functionally. You can have a token that represents a location in the linked list. From that token you have a Fetch() operation that will fetch what is at that location, a Next() operation that will fetch the next token or some indication that you are done, and depending on your language, some sort of insert or append operation (mutability factors in here)…
If your argument is that a linked-list-like data structure can be implemented using something other than a linked list, then I agree with you. Vector tries (for example) are great for that use case.
But a vector trie isn't a linked list, it's a vector trie. As such, it will be faster for some usage patterns, equal for some, and completely degenerate for some others. Just like any other data structure that isn't a linked list.
It wouldn't really be an "optimization" to implement my linked list code with something other than a linked list - it would be rewriting my code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In kernels, drivers, and embedded systems they are very common. Out of all the programmers in the world, what percentage of them do you think work in the kernel/driver/embedded spaces?
1%
> Linked lists are taught as fundamental data structures in programming courses, but they are more commonly encountered in tech interviews than in real-world projects. I beg to disagree. In kernels, drivers, and embedded systems they are very common.
Why? Why would someone reach for a linked list in a kernel, driver, or embedded system?
In embedded world, memory often needs to be exactly controlled, and allocation failures are fatal without a more complex MMU. In kernel world, I believe the main reason is that allocations can block.