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C# has a similar memory model and it's the primary language used by Unity games... would you say that's un-viable?

The game engine is different from the game logic. This may mean Java is more viable for game logic, but still not viable for the engine itself

That said, C# has value types and has for years now. Which is hugely important for arrays, and a major, major missing piece to the Java performance puzzle. C#'s FFI is also way better than the disaster that is JNI, which also plays a role here.

You are right, but I would like to add that both of these concerns will be solved in the near-far future. Java’s project Panama tries to tackle the less than ideal FFI case with a tool that can create java classes from a C header and an API for manually managing memory regions.

While Valhalla is in the works, but it is, I quote, at least 3 PhD’s worth of knowledge combined to figure it out in a backwards compatible way with all the interactions of generics, etc.

For memory layout C# actually has an important difference in that it supports value types (so you can have an array of vertices without individually allocating each one, which has a lot of overhead and drastically reduces cache efficiency). They’ve been working on adding support for that to Java for some time but it’s not in yet.

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