Hello! There're some data structures requires dynamically allocating memory, such as treap, splay treeans so on. In a recent contest, I saw a problem requiring those data structures, 17137G and noticed many legendary users submitted using pointers: 175023666, 175037024, 175043108 and 175054239... But somewhat in a Chinese OJ, many people told me that pointers are way slower than using arrays(to create a global array with sufficient number of elements and simulate the pointers), and we should avoid using pointers. In fact, we can also notice that for the above problem, almost all Chinese users submitted using arrays.

What's your opinion on this topic? I'm currently using pointers, should I insist on using pointers or change my coding way? Any help is appreciated!