Reading your statements about linked lists remind me of this talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQs6IC-vgmo Kamelito
Yes, there are common constraints between the doubly-linked lists described in Mr. Stroustrup's talk and what the ASL file requester has to deal with.
As always, lists such as these work very well if the contents are accessed in sequence, such as in queues or stacks. The scalability issues arise when random access is performed and more than a handful list items are involved. This occurs in the ASL file requester whenever new list items are added, so that the list remains sorted.
Mr. Stroustrup makes a good point that tables tend to make for better performance rather than dynamic data structures such as doubly-linked lists. This advantage becomes even more pronounced if you take the respective memory access patterns into account, which for doubly-linked lists do not play well with the CPU cache.
Sometimes, however, you do not have much of a choice between tables and dynamic data structures. The ASL file requester needs to build the list dynamically, allocating new memory as further entries are added. It is designed to work well enough on systems with very little memory (1 Megabytes of RAM), and preallocating static chunks of memory to store the table and the associated entry data in would not work so well under these constraints (although it would keep memory fragmentation at bay and probably yield better runtime performance).
