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The ideas in the STL were novel enough that when it was originally opposed the C++ committee didn't really "get" it. Generic programming existed since the 1970s, but it wasn't popular until maybe this century.

So there's just no way K&R C gets anything like the STL. Maybe you get stuff like a char* (these days you would write void * but that's not a thing yet) linked list? That does not sound like a better world.

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One pattern (not necessarily a good one, but it's definitely used out there) is to define your "generic" code in macros, and then expose a macro such as MAKE_LIST(int) that in this case instantiates a list of int. Then you get a 'type-safe' interface, or at least more type-safe than void*, and also less annoying.

And then you just abuse arrays as much as possible. For a small number of items, e.g. <100 on a modern laptop, that linear and cache-friendly search is going to beat std::map and std::unordered_map and friends.

What if the items in the array are bigger than a cache line?

Yes, of course, my statement has many caveats, you get the point.

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