linked list - Growable data structure in MATLAB

Question

I need to create a queue in matlab that holds structs which are very large. I don't know how large this queue will get. Matlab doesn't have linked lists, and I'm worried that repeated allocation and copying is really going to slow down this code which must be run thousands of times. I need some sort of way to use a growable data structure. I've found a couple of entries for linked lists in the matlab help but I can't understand what's going on. Can someone help me with this problem?

Answer 1

I posted a solution a while back to a similar problem. The way I tried it is by allocating the array with an initial size BLOCK_SIZE, and then I keep growing it by BLOCK_SIZE as needed (whenever there's less than 10%*BLOCK_SIZE free slots).

Note that with an adequate block size, performance is comparable to pre-allocating the entire array from the beginning. Please see the other post for a simple benchmark I did.