[thedracle]

There was a time when memory was conventionally expensive, memory allocation of large blocks was slow, and small blocks was much faster (malloc would find a small block faster than a large one on a highly fragmented heap).

Before having gigantic caches that would engulf nearly any sized contiguous list, linked lists were sort of vogue, frugal, and thought of as being fairly performant.

[AstralStorm]

That time is still there in embedded hardware. Even potent ARM chips (except the cellphone ones maybe) have some KB of cache at best, and similar amounts of SRAM. While code size is still at a premium since XIP (execute-in-place from in-built flash) is slower.