Who the heck puts the payload into a separate allocation? I'm pretty sure I've never seen such an implementation. Not once. I could imagine seeing something li

Who the heck puts the payload into a separate allocation? I'm pretty sure I've never seen such an implementation. Not once. I could imagine seeing something like that in textbooks where they use graphical diagrams to illustrate how a linked list works but who would actually implement it like that -- I don't know. The canonical way is to do: struct listnode { struct listnode *next; struct listnode *prev; }; struct your_own_data_node { struct listnode node; int x, y, z; }; which ensures that you can have a set of functions that operate on struct listnode * and you can use them for all of your lists.