Well, this is a good effort. I think you are quite right to leave out reference counting. Reference counting is something that you should pay for only if you need it.

I don't really understand the fear of macros. void pointers are much scarier than macros, since they open you up to the threat of bugs going undetected by the type system.

You're not by any chance maintaining one of those much-maligned "driver portability" layers, are you?

For better debugging and diagnostics, I like my macros to do as little as possible. Plus, if the generated code is the same for all types apart from an offset calculation, duplicating it is silly.

If you look at the slist, slist_queue and dlist, you'll find there are typed macros (via a container-of macro) that call down to the generic functions. I might try to extend this to macros that generate a full set of shim inline function for a particular type of list element, if it turns out to be less error prone. You won't see a void pointer being passed around on any of these.

Where function pointers come into play (binary tree, hash tables) I'll admit it's maybe not quite so clear cut as the indirection messes with branch predictors, etc. and the callbacks all take void pointer arguments. Maybe for those containers it would be better to have generator macros that produce function prototypes and implementations.

And no, I'm not doing anything particularly focused on driver portability. I mostly write OS X kexts, and the built-in data structures in xnu aren't terribly helpful. (the OSContainer family uses blocking memory allocations, can only hold refcounted objects and the map and set use linear search) Some kernel code I write is designed to be portable, and I use these data structures for that code, but it's pretty much just a standard factored design - general core and platform specific setup and API use. Nothing with any pretence of being a general solution.