I agree it isn't great, but it works, and if you need that extra performance in a small part of your application it can allow you to stay on the JVM. I'd rather

I agree it isn't great, but it works, and if you need that extra performance in a small part of your application it can allow you to stay on the JVM. I'd rather do that than write everything in C (YMMV.) The blog posts I linked compare performance to nio ByteBuffers, and show improvement for Unsafe over ByteBuffer. That might be relevant to your case.