[mppm]

Yeah... with bitcasts and some creativity (and some boilerplate) both versions are ultimately equivalent, or nearly so. But the new one pushes you towards intrusive-data-structure thinking and away from container-of thinking.

This, by the way, is a typical design consideration in Zig -- using "friction" to steer programmers away from doing the Wrong Thing (according to Andrew). In addition, Zig is really more of a fancy macro-assembler for outputting optimal code, and less a pragmatic general-purpose language, and makes design decisions accordingly. Taking both together, the linked-list change sort of makes sense, even though personally, I would have just added a separate intrusive list data structure.