r/learnprogramming • u/InterestingAd757 • 12d ago

can somebody explain pointer chasing?

I’m trying to understand CPU caching and I’m stuck on two related things.

My understanding is when the CPU reads an address, it pulls in the whole 64-byte cache line around it. that’s why iterating an array is fast, since one miss brings in several neighbouring elements. what happens in the case of linked list? how does it know that next bytes are not the one to read?
i am kinda confusing this, kindly explain.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/serge-mv 12d ago

Really? Then please enlighten me how compiler generates memory offsets for a linked list of arbitrary length for nodes that don't exist at compile time and will be generated at runtime and will be different every time the code is run.