[rschatz]

You can still use pointers. It's a bit hidden, but there are things like `Unsafe.allocateMemory`, `Unsafe.getByte` and so on ;)

[dzaima]

right; at which point the subset of jvm you're using is a subset of any other IR/VM, the 'j' in 'jvm' being only useful as an implementation/runtime.

[chaosite]

Sure, but don't discount all of the JIT optimizations that were implemented in the JVM and the huge number of engineer years invested in that particular implementation/runtime...