First of all, Rust does not offer (in the Standard library) any collection with guaranteed latency for adding elements: Rust collections may generally allocate memory when adding new elements, and allocating memory may take an unbounded amount of time in the worst case.
That being said, there are two contenders for each case:
- a stack may be implemented either on top of
VecorLinkedList(both featurepop_backandpush_back) - a queue may be implemented either on top of
VecDequeorLinkedList(both featurepop_frontandpush_back)
The difference between Vec* and LinkedList is that the latter is simplistic: for each call to push_back a memory allocation is made. On the one hand, this is great because it means that the cost of push_back is independent of the number of elements already in the collection, on the other hand… well, a memory allocation may take a really long time.
The former is a bit more complicated:
- it has better throughput, thanks to being more cache-friendly
- it has additional capacity, guaranteeing non-allocating
push_backas long as there is excess capacity - it still maintains amortized O(1)
push_backeven when not reserving excess capacity ahead of time
In general, I would advise to use Vec for a stack and VecDeque for a queue.