Comment by indigo945

The problem there is probably that Java cannot pass objects by value [1]. That incurs an additional layer of indirection when accessing the individual members of the struct, tanking performance.

That's not a necessity, though - you can use a GC in languages that allow you to control whether structs get allocated on the heap or on the stack, and then you don't have this issue. For example, in Go, structs can be allocated on the stack and passed by value, or they can be allocated on the heap and passed by reference, and this is under the control of the application programmer [2].

[1]: Actually, according to the Java spec, Java does not have pass-by-reference, and objects are always passed by value. However, that's just strange nomenclature - in Java parlance, "object" names the reference, not the actual range of memory on the heap.

[2]: The language spec does not guarantee this, so this is technically implementation-defined behavior. But then, there's really only one implementation of the Go compiler and runtime.