Summary
Lists are everywhere! While this is true, it's a fact that makes everything harder. Which list is the right tool for the job? How well will it do at certain sizes to add and later find elements? What's the overhead if my payload size is really small?
These are all questions that programmers are faced with today, and the author hopes to provide some guidance on these decisions. To recap: the least complex is the singly linked list, upon which the doubly linked list is built. Skip lists are in essence multilayered singly linked lists that provide excellent search performance at the cost of memory overhead. Last, but not least, there is the dynamic array—a type of list that wraps and manages an array for storing data just like a list.
Implementing these structures in Rust requires many pointers to the heap, especially Rc and RefCells, which were companions from the beginning to the end of the chapter. When you consider the structure of a singly linked list, each item required access to...
