&gt; Unless you consider, e.g., C, C++, and Rust as not general-purpose.<p>Of course they&#x27;re not! Even Stroustrup now calls C++ &quot;a language for those who need or want to work as close to the hardware as possible&quot;. None of these languages -- unlike Java or Go -- has simplicity as a major design goal.<p>&gt; Even C# has StructLayout where you can control the struct layout.<p>Yeah, that&#x27;s precisely my point of giving you something you don&#x27;t need. That C# does it doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s actually significant for any significant number of programs.<p>&gt; this facility is not in the works for Java at the moment<p>Paul Sandoz is working on something similar with one of the VarHandles variants (he said there&#x27;s a prototype already), namely, indexed access to object fields, which would make this a language, rather than a JVM concern.