It feels weird to say this, but Oracle&#x27;s stewardship of the jvm is making me really hopeful as an occasional ml developer.<p>Consider the wish list: I want a garbage collected language where, for a handful of large&#x2F;important data structures, I can sidestep gc and carefully control memory layouts for cache friendliness.  I&#x27;d also like direct interop with blas and my aforementioned data structures.<p>It looks like I may get all of this!<p>And yes, I&#x27;ve done a bunch of work with misc.unsafe but it&#x27;s nowhere near as nice as it could be.  What the jvm really buys you is not having to build once for each platform; I distributed code that relied on c++11 features on 3 platforms while there was mixed compiler support and it was a bloody nightmare.