Simply to construct that list is going to require all the processing power I've freed up
What? That's rediculous. BlitzPlus also used a List, it just wasn't exposed to the programmer, and you could only have instances of the same types in it. You cannot possibly comprehend how crippling this is
No offense, you're the one not comprehending here. To receap: BlitzPlus used an internal List to keep track of all types. In BlitzMAX this is no longer the case, but a linked list datatype (TList) is provided for you. If you only wish to use a single list to store a single type of objects this is possible too, James already has code that emulates the "old" Blitz way of doing things. (Basicly a Singleton Factory.) ....Its all going to take such a huge performance hit
Lists insert at constant time complexity, and itterate at linear - it is not possible to create a faster data structure for these two purposes. Added to that that BlitzMAX is nearly twice as fast as BlitzPlus, I seriously doubt you will have any external constraints on your performance.