What is the role of data structures in software development?

Data structures are a way of organizing and storing data in memory, which allows for efficient operations on them.

In software development, they play a key role because:

• They provide convenient access and management of data.
• They enable optimization of performance and resource usage.
• They help model real-world objects and their relationships.

In Flutter (and Dart), data structures are represented by classes, lists, sets, maps, etc. For example, to store a list of users, a List is used:

List<String> users = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Charlie'];

Choosing the right data structure affects the application's speed and the ease of maintaining the code.