When Java came out into the open, I had 16 MB of RAM in my 486 and that was more than most of my friends. A long take 4 bytes allocated on the stack so no GC overhead. A pentium 133 was bleeding edge and 64MB of RAM was Unix workstation territory.<p>In that backdrop, seemingly bad trade off get made for execution performance and to compile the code in a reasonable amount of time. More accurate would&#x27;ve been that the decision has not aged very well.