Perhaps they have something in mind to replace unsafe? Project Valhalla seems to address a lot of the reasons why people use unsafe. http://www.oracle.com/tech

Perhaps they have something in mind to replace unsafe? Project Valhalla seems to address a lot of the reasons why people use unsafe. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2014taylorrose-2265209.pdf http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2014taylorrose-2... (Page 40) There is also PackedObject from IBM. It's an experimental feature in their J9 JVM and it allows improved serialization and I/O of Java objects by allowing direct access to native/off heap data. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/ajax/download/c577ef63-62aa-496a-a586-9703a762f306/3e254fbb-82d7-4678-95e5-1f6751e896d8/IBM%20Java%20PackedObjects.pdf https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/ajax/dow... With the introduction of Valhalla, PackedObject and other technologies I think we'll see the performance gap decrease quite a bit.