Author here. To add context that seems lost on some: this is a cleaned-up version of my own notes from when I tried to understand the technical detail behind w

Author here. To add context that seems lost on some: this is a cleaned-up version of my own notes from when I tried to understand the technical detail behind what Linus called "good taste" in the TED talk. The main contributions of the writeup (if any) are the two conceptual insights that using an indirect pointer yields a homogeneous data structure and a convenient handle to the list item and its predecessor. The article is not intended to show an example of clean code, there is no checking for NULLs, there are implicit expectations (the target needs to exist). It's just not the point. I also strongly agree with the sentiment in the discussion that simple is often better than elegant. If it takes an entire article to figure out what's happening, that says something about how careful you should be with putting it in production code. Anyways, thanks everyone on HN for a great discussion and for all the insights, comments and suggestions!