But these are the same problems! I'm not intimately familiar with the current state and internals of project Valhalla, but they were proposing `primitive classe

But these are the same problems! I'm not intimately familiar with the current state and internals of project Valhalla, but they were proposing `primitive classes` backed by primitive types, allowing said class to be used as a type in generic code. Moreover, primitives would become ValueObjects, so you would have your int[] which would also be an Object[]. In other words, the difference between primitives and objects would be much smaller in terms of the language. Bottom line is, you could have your cake and eat it too - have an int[] that looks like a List<Int>, and vice versa, while retaining the performance characteristics of an array.