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Not necessarily all evil. Only text-book implementations require that one allocate individual nodes. Most implementations I have seen in Linux and FreeBSD can pool allocate the nodes. One can also pull off neat tricks to append link chains in these implementations to expand the list without the need to reallocate memory as needed by arrays.

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Pool allocation only addresses one of the problems with linked list; it still leaves you chasing pointers to iterate, it still decreases locality, and it still adds 4-16 bytes to every element in the container.

Meanwhile: you aren't really saying most people use pool-allocated lists, right? I see people hand-hacking malloc'd lists all the time. I rarely see custom pool allocators. It's what people were taught to do.

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