> Why would you still manually traverse a linked list? Oh right because C doesn't have parametric polymorphism (genericity) so you can't abstract out the traver

> Why would you still manually traverse a linked list? Oh right because C doesn't have parametric polymorphism (genericity) so you can't abstract out the traversal in a standard library. It's pretty easy to make something like this work: list_insert(&itemList, struct Item, &item, &compare_item); Which would be just a thin macro, for example defined like this #define list_insert(list, type, item, compare) \ __list_insert((list), \ sizeof (type), __alignof(type), \ (item), (compare)) You could further "improve" to even allow DEFINE_LIST_FUNCS(itemList, struct ItemList, compare_items); itemList_insert(&itemList, &item); It's not the end of the world. The reason C programmers usually don't make or use such "libraries" is that these are pretty easy to craft on the spot, and there are just a billion way of making it work. Allocation strategy and intrusively vs extrusively linked are two example considerations. I for one prefer to think about the best way to organize my code and data, so I'm not interested in such a library.