[ric129]

>The funny thing is Microsoft’s linked lists are faster than C++ standard vectors.

If I had to guess, it's because the std::vector is more conservative in memory use and it causes more malloc/array copy calls.

[Const-me]

I think the main reason is CAtlList class encapsulates its own memory pool. It allocates RAM in batches. The default batch size for CAtlList is 10 elements/batch, user-adjustable in constructor, but I kept the default value 10.

The elements are created directly adjacent to each other. This makes iteration faster because RAM locality despite the pointer-based data structure.