alt Hacker NewsI agree, there are actually several reasons to prefer the header impl. Debugging is better, both because you can step through the header code where you can’t with a macro function, and because the type information available to the debugger is better. There are more opportunities for compiler optimizations because each instantiation is monomorphized and you don’t pay a runtime cost with variable sizing, generic structures can also be placed on the stack because of the fixed sizing.
There are workarounds for at least two of the problems the author mentions. Naming can be changed from Bar_func(args…) to func(Bar)(args…) with a function name macro that just does name mangling. You can avoid some of the binary bloat by using weak symbols, letting the linker deduplicate functions shared between translation units at link time.
There are other problems for generic containers of pointer types however, you can work around them by using a typedef or a type alias.
Intrusive data structures are more convenient in C still, but working with them in a debugger is a pain.
Author here. It's worth noting that no work is being done in the macros of my article, they compile down to a normal c function call which you can step through in a debugger.
There is little benefit in monomorphizing the implementation of a data structure like a linked list where its behavior doesn't depend on the contents of the data it contains (compared to, say, a max heap)