ccan VS STC

Hilarious!

But I remember the first time I saw such a program which never freed anything: jitterbug, the simple bug tracker which ran as a CGI script.

It indeed allows a very simple style!

Meanwhile, use ccan/tal (https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/blob/master/ccan/tal/_i...) and be happy :)

There's CCAN, maintained by kernel hacker Rusty Russell: http://ccodearchive.net/

Please note that the above link has been claimed by squatters and isn’t the right link for CCAN anymore! The maintainer suggests [1] just using the GitHub repo [2] instead.

[1] https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/ccan/2022-September/00141...

[2] https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/

This is a great learning exercise but not very useful because using void* creates practical problems that the compiler cant help you with. IMHO, for a nice vector in C look at https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/blob/master/ccan/darray/darray.h

For more advanced intrusive lists in C, I've found that ccan's tlist2 (https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/blob/master/ccan/tlist2...) provides a decent model here.

Compared to the linux kernel's intrusive lists, it also tracks the offset of the list_node within the structure contained by the list, which eliminates another class of problems. It does still have the "using the iterator after the for loop is over" issue discussed in this article, but it also already tracks the types as Linus proposed doing in the article to resolve the issue.

ccan library https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan I think it is used also in the linux kernel(?)

ccan (analagous to cpan, but for C rather than Perl.)

You could use a discriminated union in your list node. You could use a void pointer in your list node, allocate space as needed and memcpy the date into this space, or don't allocate and store pointers to the original data. You could use an intrusive list, like this.

The fallacy in the article is that anyone should code these functions. There's plenty of public domain libraries that do this correctly.

https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/blob/master/ccan/endian...

This technique is often used to implement RAII in C. See example in Standard Template Containers. The library delivers STL-like functionality to C.

I'd say it's evil, but quite understandable very commonly used because there are no built-in alternatives in C. I basically never use void* in user-code, simply because there are no need for it when using a templating technique, like in my STC library. Even in the implementation of STC itself, void* is hardly used, if at all.

Study Other Peoples C Code and here's one that is easy to read: https://github.com/stclib/STC/releases

STC

This is more or less how C-ish templates are implemented in STC library.

As the author of a STL-like templated C container library, I had many of the exact same thoughts when implementing the unordered map. In fact, I also changed to many of the suggestions here, rather than consistently following the C++ umap API. E.g.

Sure it is. C misses a proper efficient generic standard/container library, like my https://github.com/stclib/STC, but that is irrelevant.

Smart Template Containers (STC)

Some data structure and algorithm library in C enable the (optional) separation between the interface of the container (which is expanded in your header) and its implementation (which is expanded in your source), like STC.