> The question is can you match Java's performance without significantly increasing the cost of development and especially evolution in a way that makes the tradeoff worthwhile?
This question is mostly about the person and their way of thinking.
If you have a system optimized for frequent memory allocations, it encourages you to think in terms of small independently allocated objects. Repeat that for a decade or two, and it shapes you as a person.
If you, on the other hand, have a system that always exposes the raw bytes underlying the abstractions, it encourages you to consider the arrays of raw data you are manipulating. Repeat that long enough, and it shapes you as a person.
There are some performance gains from the latter approach. The gains are effectively free, if the approach is natural for you and appropriate to the problem at hand. Because you are processing arrays of data instead of chasing pointers, you benefit from memory locality. And because you are storing fewer pointers and have less memory management overhead, your working set is smaller.
This question is mostly about the person and their way of thinking.
If you have a system optimized for frequent memory allocations, it encourages you to think in terms of small independently allocated objects. Repeat that for a decade or two, and it shapes you as a person.
If you, on the other hand, have a system that always exposes the raw bytes underlying the abstractions, it encourages you to consider the arrays of raw data you are manipulating. Repeat that long enough, and it shapes you as a person.
There are some performance gains from the latter approach. The gains are effectively free, if the approach is natural for you and appropriate to the problem at hand. Because you are processing arrays of data instead of chasing pointers, you benefit from memory locality. And because you are storing fewer pointers and have less memory management overhead, your working set is smaller.