That’s one of the few places that genuinely itch in my C experience, but I haven’t seen it solved anywhere, even partially. The hard part is, there are a myria

That’s one of the few places that genuinely itch in my C experience, but I haven’t seen it solved anywhere, even partially. The hard part is, there are a myriad tiny variations of each data structure, especially the simplest ones (even prehistoric Knuth vol 1 lists a dozen of versions of a linked list); the C practice is generally to write the most appropriate one in each case (because there is no reason to value a premade one if you don’t have any, and because manual implementation makes to want and appreciate those small affordances that pointer-to-head / dummy-head / cyclic pointer-to-head / cyclic dummy-head / etc. give you). This does not always work well, both because it forces you to optimize with little data, and because natural laziness can lead you to avoid a marginally more complex data structure for longer than you really should (and possibly have the laziness-induced inefficiency be lost and forgotten). But it does give working with data structures in C a certain feel and style that I haven’t seen reproduced with reusable implementations. When a language uses those, it’s either by choosing a small set of structures and running with them (Lua, Awk, Python, perhaps Tcl as a more interesting example) or by parametrizing everything to the hilt (C++ and D). Even in C, the language more steers you towards rolling your own than forces it (cue qsort & bsearch, BSD and Linux macros, etc.). Yet the small set is frequently too small, and the One Implementation to rule them all is bloated far beyond the mental capacity of a single person and still too inflexible. Honestly, if there is something I’d like from a C successor, it’s reproducing the hand-rolled-data-structure style without the actual hand rolling (in most cases), and that’s as much a library feature as a language one. I can name a lot of other things I’d like to see in my low-level language, but if I had to choose one improvement, that would be it. So far, I haven’t seen a convincing attempt.