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Never traversing the list. Removal every time a peer disconnects.

Removal with intrusive containers: flip two pointers.

Removal with std::vector<>: copy all the subsequent items in the vector one position backwards.

Since you never traverse the list, the order of elements obviously doesn't matter. In that case, you can just swap the element to remove with the last element.

A vector will still give you better cache-locality and also amortize the number of allocations.

Yes, that's exaclty what ZeroMQ is doing. Then check how the code looks like. It's a mess. Intrusive containers deliver same performance characteristics and the code actually looks clean.

And what stops you using an intrusive datastructure in C++?

Nothing. But if he is going to write C in C++, then what is the point of writing C++? Especially sticking to C gives substantially increased flexibility in terms of language bindings, embedded usage etc.

I've probably spent more years writing C++ code than C code, but I'm all with him on this - if what you need to do for whatever reason don't need/benefit all that much from C++ when accounting for all constraints, then choosing C as being the lowest common denominator between other languages is a very good choice for a library.

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