see https://st.aticpan.org/source/RURBAN/illguts-0.49/index.html#hv

the collisions for a bucket are stored in a linked list.

> Agreed. I too find Perl's arrays a delight to use. :)

Perl arrays use a doubling trick to ensure that push and unshift are near O(1) like with linked lists.

They allocate more memory than needed, and start and end are given by pointers° inside that area. In the rare cases it's exhausted, twice as much memory is dynamically allocated and the data transferred.

So its space for time and the cost for re-allocation is reduced to a constant on average.

And splice'ing should still be far more expensive than with linked lists.

°) kind of a sliding window