Container of pointers is not exactly what STL containers are about, and smart pointers is a big can of worms in themselves as I'm sure you know. Another angle

Container of pointers is not exactly what STL containers are about, and smart pointers is a big can of worms in themselves as I'm sure you know. Another angle to consider is this - if container control elements (like list_head) are stored in the actual data items, they are effectively pre-allocated, meaning that inserting an item into the container involves no heap activity, and this helps simplifying the (error handling) code quite a bit. I mean... all in all, even it seems hacky, it is a more elegant idea. STL to C-style containers is what Java is to C++ - something with all fun drained from it :)