IF you are already willing to take the performance hit of using perl, then there is usually very little point doing linked lists in perl.

Once you have decided to "pay" the price of perl, you get perl arrays, hashes etc included, which tend to map to real world structures and problems more conveniently (to the programmer) than "classical" linked lists (which are more convenient to the computer).

It's like buying a truck and trying to use it to do something non-truckish - e.g. pull wheelies. While that may be possible don't be surprised if you get strange looks, or people don't think it's for a serious purpose.