I did quite a lot of scientific computation using Apache Spark (thus, jvm) for a while, and the lack of more specific numeric types, like machine hardware suppo

I did quite a lot of scientific computation using Apache Spark (thus, jvm) for a while, and the lack of more specific numeric types, like machine hardware supported types, in the JVM was a veritable pain in the ass to work around. I don't know if that is a handicap to the idea you mention, but it may be...perhaps dropping into C for hardware performance and then back up to the JVM is just too annoying since things representable in hardware had no non-super-tedious representation back in the JVM (Scala or Java in my case).