pottery

This is true, but your second point is difficult to do in C. You would have to have a set template and a separate lookup template to search the set based on a key type. This is actually how heterogeneous lookup is implemented in C++: it's a template within a template. This is not a big deal in C++ because templates are instantiated automatically but we're instantiating templates manually in C. It's also only available as of C++14 and only on ordered containers, not hash tables. It's more straightforward to combine these templates: make map the fundamental type, but make values contain their keys and make the key type default to the value type if omitted. This way it's both a map and a set. My own C hash table template does it this way [1]: it stores only a value type and not keys, but there is an optional separate key type used for lookup

Might as well plug mine too: https://github.com/ludocode/pottery I'm not really sure what makes a project take off on HN. I posted mine here a couple weeks ago and got one single upvote :(. I'm glad to see the new style of #include templates getting more attention though. I think in general it's the right way to do templates in C.

I wrote a toy chess engine a few weeks ago as well as an example for one of my open source libraries [1]. I was inspired by a video of someone writing one in half an hour [2], so I also assumed it would take a day or two at most. It took more like a week. But it was very satisfying to not be able to beat my engine anymore. I highly recommend that all programmers with even a passing interest in chess spend some time writing an engine. [1] https://github.com/ludocode/pottery/tree/master/examples/pot... [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=nzObJ2BpKrk