Value types are the main culprit behind Java's insane memory consumption. I found out through weeks of testing and benchmarking.
I mostly benchmarked a small subset of our own applications and data structures. We use a lot of strings, so I never even started to use Java's String class, only byte[].
I tried all sorts of things like representing a sorted map as two large arrays to avoid the extra Entry objects. I implemented a special purpose b-tree like data structure. I must have tried every Map implementation out there (there are many!). I stored multiple small strings in one large byte[].
The point is, in order to reduce Java's memory consumption, you must reduce the number of objects and object references. Nothing else matters much. It leads to horribly complex code and it is extremely unproductive. The most ironic thing about it is that you can't use Java's generics for any of it, because they don't work with primitives.
I also spent way too much time testing all sorts of off-heap solutions. At the end of the day, it's just not worth it. Using Go or C# (or maybe Swift if it gets a little faster) for small to medium sized heaps and C++ or Rust for the humungous sizes is a lot less work than making the JVM do something it clearly wasn't built to do.
