Any point in using linked lists?

Except than being too lazy to use arrays? The amount of cache misses you are going to get overweights the other benefits.

>>8
Are you stupid? Of course you are.

>>5-chan's approach basically consists of using an array-backed allocator. Implementing a self-balancing binary tree would look exactly like it is with using genuine linked lists, only using her custom malloc/free-lookalikes that initialize and return a reference to a new array element or add it to the free list (that >>5-chan forgot to mention).

>>8, how do you find the index of the right subnode without iterating over the entire left subtree first?