Quite the contrary, it's when people think they understand the memory layout, the callstack, the alignment requirements, etc and abuse that knowledge to "optim

Quite the contrary, it's when people think they understand the memory layout, the callstack, the alignment requirements, etc and abuse that knowledge to "optimize" their code or out of sheer laziness you get all the problems of C. Just ignore how things are stored in memory and treat it like Java and you will be just fine. Only difference should be that you have to think about memory allocation and object lifetime/ownership.