Singly Linked List vs Doubly Linked List
Before looking at the differences between the singly linked list and doubly linked list, we first understand what is singly linked list and doubly linked list separately.
Introduction to Singly Linked List
Singly Linked List is a variant of Linked List which allows only forward traversal of linked lists. This is a simple form, yet it is effective for several problems such as Big Integer calculations.
A singly linked list is made up of nodes where each node has two parts:
- The first part contains the actual data of the node
- The second part contains a link that points to the next node of the list that is the address of the next node.
The beginning of the node marked by a special pointer named START. The pointer points to the fist node of the list but the link part of the last node has no next node to point to.
The main difference from an array is:
- Elements are not stored in contiguous memory locations.
- Size of Linked List need not be known in advance. It can increase at runtime depending on number of elements dynamically without any overhead.
In Singly Linked List, only the pointer to the first node is stored. The other nodes are accessed one by one.
To get the address of ith node, we need to traverse all nodes before it because the address of ith node is stored with i-1th node and so on.