Note that this (and the article) describes an intrusive linked list. Extrusive linked lists (like you might see in a class library or CS 101 project), where the node structure is heap-allocated separately from the data that it points to, have very few practical advantages over vectors, which is why standard libraries are increasingly defaulting to vectors even when the class is named "list".
Yes. An intrusive list puts the pointers to next & prev in the struct itself. IntrusiveList<Member>::iterator is a Member*, then member->next points to another Member*. An extrusive list puts the pointers in a separate node structure, which then has a pointer to the actual member type. ExtrusiveList<Member>::iterator is a ExtrusiveListNode<Member>*, node->next points to another ExtrusiveListNode*, and you access the actual Member* with node->data. Basically it's a double indirection.
The advantage of extrusive linked lists is that you don't need to modify the data layout of Member at all. All the linked list manipulation happens on ListNodes, which have a pointer to the actual member, which can be accessed with just a cast. That's why they're so well-suited to class libraries: you can easily write a generic ExtrusiveLinkedList that works with any data that can be represented with a pointer, hide all the traversal (and the existence of individual ExtrusiveListNodes) in accessor functions, and present a simple API with no codegen or modifications to Member.
The advantages of intrusive linked lists are 1) performance 2) no heap allocations 3) easy traversal when given a Member*. It's only a single indirection rather than a double, and usually that indirection is necessary anyway to avoid copies. Insertion and deletion are just pointer manipulation; you don't need to allocate new space for the nodes. Oftentimes your functions will take Member* anyway, and it's nice not to take or traverse the container if you just need to peek at the next element coming up.
The point of this subthread is that intrusive linked lists have very clear use cases in the kernel & embedded spaces, where these advantages are often critical. Extrusive linked lists, however, have very few advantages over vectors (which also require heap allocation but are more cache & locality friendly). In a common business app responding to user input, the difference between O(1) amortized and O(1) is negligible; you can eat the occasional pause for a vector resizing, because the user isn't going to care about a few milliseconds. They both require heap allocation. The vector will give you much faster traversal, because subsequent reads all hit cache. The vector takes less memory (1 pointer per element, with a max of 50% overhead, while an extrusive doubly-linked list is 3 pointers per element). There's just little reason to use an extrusive linked list because the use-cases where intrusive linked lists are not better are precisely the same ones where vectors are better.
