I was surprised to see nodes still have two pointers ("references") given that you now know that that the first pointer will always point exactly to the next no

I was surprised to see nodes still have two pointers ("references") given that you now know that that the first pointer will always point exactly to the next node. I've see https://github.com/rswier/c4 https://github.com/rswier/c4 use that. Granted it doesn't make for the most readable code, but it's even smaller and faster.