pitfiend, pointer-based approach is not type safe (remember why we using Pascal?) and has poor data locality, and therefore performance.
So we need to implement collections for each type. Good news that size increase is negligible in case of a few collections and algorithms.

gasdeveloper, the problem with generics is compatibility between Delphi and FPC syntax. I don't know exactly which FPC version is ok for this. Generics with FPC syntax are supported from FPC 2.2.