It's a deficiency of the C++ standard library, not the language itself.
You can find an implementation of intrusive lists in C++ in boost. http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_51_0/doc/html/intrusive.html
This is a data structure, optimization, software development problem. The reason we use any 3rd party generic (in C OR C++) doubly linked list is because it helps code the problem faster. Any time you use a component you need to be aware of its overhead. After profiling my C++ code if I found that the std::list was taking up all my memory and all my cpu time I would then evaluate the algorithms I am using and pick the data structure that best fits that be that a custom link list or something else such as the above mentioned boost library.
You even have to nitpick the example about erase being expensive. When using std::list why isn't the code passing around the iterators rather than the person object? And for the memory of std::list overhead why didn't he use std::list<person>?
There is no problem using a hand made C style doubly link list in your C++ code for the core part of your application for performance reasons. Being a C++ program doesn't mean you can't use C style code or even have asm snippets. Following the same logic as the blog ZeroMQ should have been written in ASM and not C because it could have been faster, or the reverse it should have been written in Ruby because it would have been coded in a quarter of the time (but at the trade of slower runtime)
As for the conclusion I would say that the inefficiency is still in ZeroMQ code as the author doesn't fully understand C++.
class person
{
protected:
int age;
int wieght;
};
template <class Base>
class people: public Base
{
private:
Base *prev;
Base *next;
};
people<person> plist;