[pron]

> Unless you consider, e.g., C, C++, and Rust as not general-purpose.

Of course they're not! Even Stroustrup now calls C++ "a language for those who need or want to work as close to the hardware as possible". None of these languages -- unlike Java or Go -- has simplicity as a major design goal.

> Even C# has StructLayout where you can control the struct layout.

Yeah, that's precisely my point of giving you something you don't need. That C# does it doesn't mean it's actually significant for any significant number of programs.

> this facility is not in the works for Java at the moment

Paul Sandoz is working on something similar with one of the VarHandles variants (he said there's a prototype already), namely, indexed access to object fields, which would make this a language, rather than a JVM concern.