Two points here:
Linked lists are useful in unsafe code. Most recent use case I had for them was in an event loop with coroutines. It's not possible to implement such thing in memory safe languages. For example if you use Rust, you have to use unsafe [1].
@fieldParentPtr does not yet have safety but it is a planned upcoming change to the language, with a fairly straightforward implementation [2].
[1]: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atokio-rs%2Ftokio%20unsafe...
Oh, that makes more sense. Thank you!
Is this linked list type then mostly meant to be used as an internal implementation detail, and not be exposed in a public API? Because if I see a function that takes a non-generic list I won't really know how to call it. :)
Linked lists are sometimes the right tool for the job. They are available in the standard library for such cases. If you are struggling to understand how you would use this API then it probably means you have not yet been exposed to such a use case, and you are being quite intentionally steered away from using them.