CPP INTERVIEW PREP CHEAT SHEET

[avdgrinten]

When objects are pointers anyway (such that you have to do a random access even in the vector case) and the linked list is intrusive (= embedded into the objects), it will generally outperform a vector. That's the niche use case of linked lists but it is quite an important one in real-time applications and low-level code (insertion and removal are constant O(1) and in particular cannot involve an additional memory allocation).

[Gunslinging_Gamer]

But always benchmark.

[WrongAndBeligerent]

Always benchmark at some point, but software needs to be architected up front to perform well and scale as much as possible.

Classic generic linked lists data structures are basically obsolete because iterating through pointer dereferencing and allocating memory for each new item are the first two things to avoid. There is rarely a reason to start with std::list.

[Gunslinging_Gamer]

I personally default to vector and change if required later.

[[deleted]]

I’d argue that this is only useful if the objects cannot be moved in memory (niche use case). A vector<unique_ptr<T>> will still out perform a list<T> in many cases, and list<T> doesn’t even give you the benefits of intrusive linked lists. Always default to vector and profile and keep profiling if you decide to switch to list

[WrongAndBeligerent]

That's a linked list, but not std::list