Circular Linked List Application & Pros/Cons

Circular Linked List Application ProsCons

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)
Circular Linked List Application

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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Circular Linked List

  • Introduction to Circular Linked List
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  • Circular Linked List Applications
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  • Circular Linked List in –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Insertion in Circular Linked List –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Insertion at the beginning–
    C | C++ | Java
  • Insertion at the end –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Insertion at nth position –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Deletion in Circular Linked List –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Deletion from beginning in Circular Linked List –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Deletion from nth position in Circular Linked List –
  • Deletion from end in Circular Linked List –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Insertion and Deletion in Circular Linked List – C | C++ | Java
  • Split a Circular Linked List in two halves –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Count nodes in Circular Linked List –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Sorted Insert In Circular Linked List –
    C | C++ | Java
  • Insertion in the middle in Circular Linked List –
    C | C++ | Java

Circular Linked List