The distinction in the article really is between calling malloc for every added node in your data structure (“pointer”) or using the pre-allocated memory in the next element of an array (“index”).
This is only one of the advantages discussed in TFA. The others are those due to using indices instead of pointers (like smaller size, cache locality, range checking, possibility of data exchange between systems with distinct address spaces).
Comments
The distinction in the article really is between calling malloc for every added node in your data structure (“pointer”) or using the pre-allocated memory in the next element of an array (“index”).
This is only one of the advantages discussed in TFA. The others are those due to using indices instead of pointers (like smaller size, cache locality, range checking, possibility of data exchange between systems with distinct address spaces).