Better understanding of Zig idioms

[biosbob]

@AndrewCodeDev

But with an intrusive list, it’s the other way around. You embed the “links” inside of the data object and you point to another of the same kind of node in different object.

This is powerful because you can add an arbitrary number of links in these things. They aren’t just “contained” by one list - you can basically make a web if you wanted to.

Good article: In-Depth: Intrusive Lists

I’ve used the techniques described here with great success when targeting resource-constrained MCUs; and like @nyc has suggested, putting the link pointer at the beginning of my Elem structure just made everything easier.

In my world, however, it’s often the case that ALL memory is statically allocated – which is to say that my arbitrarily complex “web” of nodes is “pre-wired”.

But then I ran into a limitation discussed in this post, where (very!!) ancient issue #131 describes the problem.

[[ good news and bad news here? @mlugg does have this on his (full!) plate; but it’s currently targeted for 0.14.0 from what I can understand ]]

In the meanwhile, I’m continuing to evaluate alternatives to (efficiently!) implementing these sorts of statically-declared (recursive) web of nodes.