RS.CLIPPY.LINKEDLIST

Usage of LinkedList, usually a vector is faster, or a more specialized data structure like a `VecDeque`

This checker is a Clippy lint created by The Rust Project Contributors. The documentation shown here is a copy of the original documentation for: linkedlist. Copyright ©2025 The Rust Team. All rights reserved.

What it does

Checks for usage of any LinkedList, suggesting to use a Vec or a VecDeque (formerly called RingBuf).

Why is this bad?

Gankra says:

The TL;DR of LinkedList is that it's built on a massive amount of pointers and indirection. It wastes memory, it has terrible cache locality, and is all-around slow. RingBuf, while "only" amortized for push/pop, should be faster in the general case for almost every possible workload, and isn't even amortized at all if you can predict the capacity you need.

LinkedLists are only really good if you're doing a lot of merging or splitting of lists. This is because they can just mangle some pointers instead of actually copying the data. Even if you're doing a lot of insertion in the middle of the list, RingBuf can still be better because of how expensive it is to seek to the middle of a LinkedList.

Known problems

False positives – the instances where using a LinkedList makes sense are few and far between, but they can still happen.

Example

let x: LinkedList<usize> = LinkedList::new();

Configuration

avoid-breaking-exported-api: Suppress lints whenever the suggested change would cause breakage for other crates.

(default: true)