There are several advantages to intrusive node-based data structures that I haven't seen stated in the article or the comments:

- the same object can move between containers with no allocation and no need for a dedicated complex API

- the same object can be part of multiple containers at once; particularly useful for intrusive binary trees, for indexing data with different criteria.

- the container can be fully polymorphic, no need for all elements to be the same dynamic type.

- no need for complex allocators, you can just store the objects as you see fit.

This feels like a net negative result. It removes some of the complexity of using generics, but it couples between the data type and the collections it can be indexed by.

What are the benefits of this approach? Is it limited to data alignment, or is it out of a greater desire to remove generics?

I don't use Zig, but one advantage of having a genericised intrusive linked list where the next pointer doesn't have to be the first thing in the structure is when you want to use larger types, such as 128-bit fields. Sticking a pointer at the beginning would mean the compiler would have to insert alignment padding after the pointer or break the default alignment.

Can someone explain how the claim of higher performance works here? In C, which lacks generics, an intrusive list is preferred because otherwise you end up with each node having a void pointer to the data it holds. The previous Zig version was a generic, so the data type could easily be a value type. Given that the compiler is allowed to rearrange the layout of both structs unless data is packed or extern (in which case it almost certainly won't want to have a linked list node in the middle anyway) isn't the resulting type exactly the same in memory unless you intentionally made T a pointer type?

> The new version isn't generic. Rather, you embed the linked list node with your data. This is known as an intrusive linked list and tends to perform better and require fewer allocations.

I don’t get this. In the generic version the data is embedded with the linked list node, so there’s only one allocation per node. ‘T’ isn’t a pointer (or doesn’t have to be) there’s no indirection between data and node.