Editing XOR linked list (section)

== Drawbacks ==

* General-purpose debugging tools cannot follow the XOR chain, making debugging more difficult;<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.iecc.com/gclist/GC-faq.html#GC,%20C,%20and%20C++ |title=GC [garbage collection] FAQ – draft |first=David |last=Gadbois |display-authors=etal|access-date=5 December 2018}}</ref>
* The price for the decrease in memory usage is an increase in code complexity, making maintenance more expensive;
* Most [[garbage collection (computer science)|garbage collection]] schemes do not work with data structures that do not contain literal [[pointer (computer programming)|pointer]]s;
* Not all languages support [[type conversion]] between pointers and integers, XOR on pointers is not defined in some contexts;
* While traversing the list, the address of the previously accessed node is needed to calculate the next node's address and the pointers will be unreadable if one isn't traversing the list&mdash;for example, if the pointer to a list item was contained in another data structure;
* XOR linked lists do not provide some of the important advantages of doubly linked lists, such as the ability to delete a node from the list knowing only its address or the ability to insert a new node before or after an existing node when knowing only the address of the existing node.

Computer systems have increasingly cheap and plentiful memory, therefore storage overhead is not generally an overriding issue outside specialized [[embedded system]]s. Where it is still desirable to reduce the overhead of a linked list, [[unrolled linked list|unrolling]] provides a more practical approach (as well as other advantages, such as increasing cache performance and speeding [[random access]]).