A Simple LinkedList Implementation in Ruby

Being bored out of my mind on Monday night, and not having anything interesting to watch on TV, I decided I’d try my hand at implementing a linked list in Ruby. For the impatient:

1 $ sudo gem install linked_list

Unfortunately, performance is very poor:

Building a list of 1 million random strings
Took 4.389 seconds
Converting to an array
Took 1.686 seconds
user system total real
list#push/pop 0.350000 0.000000 0.350000 ( 0.364001)
array#push/pop 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.009894)
user system total real
list#last 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.000027)
array#last 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.000012)
user system total real
list#first 0.010000 0.000000 0.010000 ( 0.001188)
array#first 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.000449)
user system total real
list#reverse 7.540000 0.170000 7.710000 ( 7.806306)
array#reverse 0.010000 0.010000 0.020000 ( 0.008443)
user system total real
list#dup 23.080000 0.380000 23.460000 ( 24.039316)
array#dup 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.000017)

NOTE: #dup is implemented as self.reverse.reverse, which is pretty inefficient, I know. Thanks for asking.

I probably have implementation issues, but I expected #push and #pop to be as fast as the Array implementation. Anyway, if anyone’s interested, there’s a GitHub repository.