> It just allows you to control where your objects are in memory and compiler optimizations based on this. It does not help you with memory footprint.

It is already better than what you get on Hotspot.

> The challenges especially regarding primitive generics are not to be underestimated. See

The challenge here is due to how Java designers to build them in first place.

Modula-3 and Eiffel are two examples of languages with proper generics, value types and toolchains that do AOT compilation to native code.

So I am still hopeful.

However, like everything, some challenges are technical and some are political.