&gt;It&#x27;s fair to call it that when comparing against any language or runtime targetting general-purpose development<p>Unless you consider, e.g., C, C++, and Rust as not general-purpose.  Even C# has StructLayout where you can control the struct layout.  Heck, Go and C# allow you to embed a fixed size array into a struct (this facility is not in the works for Java at the moment).