I've heard of two possibilities (as a recommendation) for using data structures in C without having to develop them:

- BSD queue.h offers linked lists, queues, etc [1].

- UT-hash offers hash tables [2].

I've also read some people being frustrated with them, probably due to the quirky syntax/API. On the plus side (BSD at least) it's just a header file that you can download, include and start using.

[1] http://bxr.su/OpenBSD/sys/sys/queue.h

[2] https://troydhanson.github.io/uthash/