Basically, the difference is that every trellis of a given length looks the same, whereas this is not the case for VLists. The trellis is also lispier. VLists are faster in a lot of cases, but they sound like they're harder for the programmer.
They are also possible to implement in every Lisp (except Clojure [1]) because you only need cons, car, cdr, and some basic arithmetic to use them. This also means you can make them do anything (except, like, push and pop in constant time) that you would ordinarily need a linked list for. I haven't done this yet, but I think they support homoiconicity.
[1] In clojure, cons takes an object and a sequence instead of an object and an object, making an implementation there a lot less elegant.
EDIT: I thought this over, and, suppose you need to store huge, huge amounts of data. Where's that first array going to be stored on the memory? It needs to be contiguous. Here, you only need two memory addresses at a time for the cons cells.
EDIT2: you have to declare a type for your array. With trellises don't. Even if you declare your array as an array of pointers, nesting is an issue.
Basically, the difference is that every trellis of a given length looks the same, whereas this is not the case for VLists. The trellis is also lispier. VLists are faster in a lot of cases, but they sound like they're harder for the programmer.
They are also possible to implement in every Lisp (except Clojure [1]) because you only need cons, car, cdr, and some basic arithmetic to use them. This also means you can make them do anything (except, like, push and pop in constant time) that you would ordinarily need a linked list for. I haven't done this yet, but I think they support homoiconicity.
[1] In clojure, cons takes an object and a sequence instead of an object and an object, making an implementation there a lot less elegant.
EDIT: I thought this over, and, suppose you need to store huge, huge amounts of data. Where's that first array going to be stored on the memory? It needs to be contiguous. Here, you only need two memory addresses at a time for the cons cells.
EDIT2: you have to declare a type for your array. With trellises don't. Even if you declare your array as an array of pointers, nesting is an issue.