Interesting. How would you use one of these implementations to persist a large trie beyond what physical memory can support?
I think this algorithm might be a win if the trie contains a huge word (say, 1GB).
Also, if you want to support all 256 values in a byte for each byte of the string to be entered into the trie, the whole idea of using a list structure seems inefficient. On average, to find the next byte in the trie would require 128 comparison operations.