When I hear "Java uses too much ram," lazy reclamation of the heap and other GC overhead are not the first things that come to my mind, personally. Java doesn'

When I hear "Java uses too much ram," lazy reclamation of the heap and other GC overhead are not the first things that come to my mind, personally. Java doesn't have a "struct". If you want to represent an array of 64-bit signed integers, Java has you covered with its primitive arrays. But if you want to represent an array of anything more interesting than that, (say, a tuple of a double and a long), you have to serialize and deserialize those objects to and from parallel primitive arrays or byte buffers. Because if you do the language-natural thing and use an Object array, you're paying a huge price in memory: 4 or 8 bytes per pointer in that array, plus a 16 byte Object header on each Object. And, of course, those Objects are all individual allocations, not necessarily contiguous. That's a lot of overhead! Of course, Java programmers concerned with memory usage don't put up with this. Lots of solutions have been devised. OpenHFT's Chronicle Values[0] is one example I came across recently. But this feels like fighting with the language compared to how easy it is to be efficient with memory in C. If you told a beginner C programmer to make an array of compound objects, it's not unlikely that their array will take up exactly as much space in memory as it intuitively seems like it should. (8 byte double + 8 byte long) * 100 values = 1600 bytes in C, no fuss. If you asked the average Java programmer for that they'd give you something that would take up 3 times as much memory. And because Java makes that behavior natural, it "uses too much ram". It doesn't matter as much that it's possible to convince it not too. 0. https://github.com/OpenHFT/Chronicle-Values https://github.com/OpenHFT/Chronicle-Values