[Sharlin]

C++ doesn't really make a difference between builtin and user-defined data types. They all have value semantics, and a lot of effort has been spent to make user-defined types able to mimic builtin types as closely as possible. Classes and structs have no semantic differences besides default visibility of member names. For reference semantics, you use explicit references.

Java wanted to enforce reference semantics (and heap storage) for classes, but still wanted to retain value semantics (and stack storage) with fundamental types for performance reasons. The result is the mess we have now.