All about lists

[sasa]

I wouldn't be surprised much if lists in Prime are organized as arrays with in small 64K blocks having pointers to data objects for faster access by index (instead use long walk from root node). For 32bit architecture, limit would be 16K pointers per block, which (by some reason) here is only 10K.

In any event, with 32/256MB of RAM, pure pointer based implementation of linked lists should have only that physical limit. If, however, are used such small blocks of memory for faster access, all that could be linked as well, avoiding additional work you have mentioned and making such limit unnecessary.

However, only Cyrille or Tim are able to elaborate more regarding internal organization of lists in Prime.