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Reading this thread as C programmer has me scratching my head.

Of course you have to resort to low-level functionality to achieve performance. That's how computers work. We can't all live in fuzzy wuzzy land.

Surely Unsafe is safer than writing the whole thing in C and using JNI?

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I completely agree - I have no problem with leveraging low-level functionality, but there's usually a safe and and unsafe way to approach it - and from what I've read 'unsafe' doesn't take the secure approach.

(separately: why the downvote? I get downvoted for having the opinion that it's worth a tiny bit of performance for improved security?)

Yes. Also there are many "safe" operations on "unsafe". Such as memory fences.

Multithreading is somewhat unsafe in general. And so is ability to do most I/O, you might overwhelm the system.

Sure. Unsafe in terms of program correctness. By that measure, new Thread() is unsafe.

But that's not a reasonable definition of "unsafe". This could crash the JVM is a reasonable definition. And fences and ordered instructions cannot.

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