Circular Linked List Application & Pros/Cons

February 22, 2023

What is a circular linked list?

A circular linked list is similar to the single linked list except that the last node points to the first node in the list. This means that circular linked list is a sequence of elements in which every element has link to its next element in the sequence and the last element has a link to the first element in the sequence.

Applications of Circular Linked List

A Circular Linked List can be used for the following –

Circular lists are used in applications where the entire list is accessed one-by-one in a loop.
It is also used by the Operating system to share time for different users, generally uses a Round-Robin time-sharing mechanism.
Multiplayer games use a circular list to swap between players in a loop.
Implementation of Advanced data structures like Fibonacci Heap
The browser cache which allows you to hit the BACK button
Undo functionality in Photoshop or Word
Circular linked lists are used in Round Robin Scheduling
Circular linked list used Most recent list (MRU LIST)

Difference between linked list and circular linked list Linked list is a linear data structure that consists of a group of nodes in a sequence. Each node has got two parts, a data part- which stores the data and an address part- which stores the address of the next node. Hence forming a chain-like structure. Linked lists are used to create trees and graphs.

Circular linked list: In a circular linked list, the last node's address part holds the address of the first node hence forming a circular chain-like structure.

Insertion in Circular Linked List

Insertion at the beginning in Circular Linked List

Insertion at end in Circular Linked List

Insertion at nth position in Circular Linked List

Deletion in Circular Linked List

Advantage of circular linked list

Entire list can be traversed from any node of the list.
It saves time when we have to go to the first node from the last node.
Its is used for the implementation of queue.
Reference to previous node can easily be found.
When we want a list to be accessed in a circle or loop then circular linked list are used.

Disadvantage of circular linked list

Circular list are complex as compared to singly linked lists.
Reversing of circular list is a complex as compared to singly or doubly lists.
If not traversed carefully, then we could end up in an infinite loop.
Like singly and doubly lists circular linked lists also doesn’t support direct accessing of elements.

What is the benefit of a circularly linked list over singly linked list in search applications?

If your program wants to access items of Linked List over and over again in a loop. Such processes do exist in OS, where some list of system processes must be implemented in loop one by one
These are round-robin type of OS scheduling algorithms
Any node can be the starting point since, we can access all nodes from anywhere, unlike a singly linked list where we must only start from the head node if we want to access all nodes.
The fibonacci heap can be implemented via Circular Linked List

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