Waiting in Line: Linked Lists, Stacks, Queues, Deques and Ring Buffers

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 48m

In a London trading firm, Hana Sato's order gateway takes nine hundred microseconds on the busiest minute of the day, and Marcus says her queue is too big. In part three of The Deep End's Data Structures series we give the linked list a fair hearing, follow the stack from Turing to a four-kilobyte engine controller, bend an array into a sushi belt, and learn why Little's law and bufferbloat say that a queue that never fills is a delay line. We take apart the LMAX Disruptor, the Linux kernel's intrusive lists and the work-stealing deques inside every parallel runtime. Hana, Marcus and their…