My resume isn't too hard to find. There's even some C code out there with my name on it if you look hard enough.

Performant C code doesn't use linked lists. Linked lists shred caches and allocators. Your go-to data structure for storing resizeable arrays is... wait for it... the resizeable array. I call mine "vector.h".

(That performant code often doesn't want a hash table is also why I backported STLport's red-black tree to C specialized on void* in my second-to-last major C project, but I'm just saying that because I'm proud of that hack.)

The kinds of lists that barrkel are talking about are what I call hooked-in lists as opposed to the container style lists seen in the STL. That is, objects that already existed are linked together through fields inside the object themselves. Since you're probably already operating on the object, it's not quite as bad for cache performance as the container style lists. Further, since the objects already exist, the memory allocation overhead is minimal. All objects of that type need an extra pointer, but there's no allocation required to add something to the list.

This is how the Linux kernel maintains just about everything. It's also how I've implemented lists inside of an allocator: http://github.com/scotts/streamflow/blob/master/streamflow.h...

I get that void* lists are even worse, but randomly malloc'ing a bunch of struct-foo's and linking them with pointers is worse than keeping a pool of memory chunks of struct-foo size and maintaining a length counter, since hopping from foo to foo isn't likely to hop from page to page.

With hooked-in lists, you rarely need to navigate through the whole list. You usually just need to get the next one. Having implemented hooked-in lists, the backing for them was a fixed size of memory chunks, but that was one level of abstraction lower. The Linux kernel does something similar.

(Felt I should clarify that it's nothing about hooked-in lists that prevent you from navigating the whole list. It's just the algorithms you end up using to solve the problems that pop-up at that level of systems programming.)

Err... why does the existence of shitty "C apps abound" have anything to do with how performant C programs are written?