When should you use linked list in C++?

Question

Getting them mixed up with arrays and such. What type of situation in the world would require you to use linked list?

Answer 1

In a stenography translator that I wrote I used a linked list to construct a syllable database where syllables were related by links in order to parse and construct whole words. The database was self-optimizing as syllables were accessed and self-balancing as words were added, which was a matter of replacing links instead of rearranging the data. So in this case it was a matter of time efficiency in which relational links could be updated quicker than moving the data.

Answer 2

Usually when you want to track the previous node like for example a train station where station is the Linked list and the items there are the station and the train. You might want to track easily the previous and next station with linked list as they are "Linked"

Answer 3

a LINK to a nice article with a LIST of some use cases .😁😁😁

https://www.naukri.com/code360/library/application-of-linked-list-data-structure

Answer 4

@John Albert Flores
Thanks. Do programmers actually use linked lists? Do they actually use it for tracking destinations of trains? Or is there a better approach?

Answer 5

Tantina4337 I like your question in the comment. Do programmers actually use linked lists? Do they actually use it for tracking .....? Is there a better approach?

Well, to answer that. We don't ! It's my 15yrs as a professional in c++ and vector will always come out as the best choice 99.999% of the time. The only time I remember using std::forward_list is for a spatial acceleration demonstration I wrote in 2019, then I don't have any choice cos I'm working with over 5 million entities and optimization is very important. Since rvalue reference now exists, it's even giving vector more power.

I rarely see anyone use anything other than vector. Now going into the source code of tensorflow c++, deque is used many times as much as vector.