Yeah and it also allows addressing beyond 2GB. I've been using DirectByteBuffers for the sake of being compatible with Android which I think doesn't give you access to the Unsafe API probably. I'll see if I can add a compiler option to use Unsafe for the JVMs that have it in the future. That'll probably do wonders for performance since Unsafe APIs are intrinsics. Unsafe is currently used in the Eta RTS for atomic CAS operations (which should be compatible in Android) on some of the RTS data types.