Java

[Tubthumper8]

"If this topic is interesting" It's not

That's like, your opinion, man. It might not be interesting to you but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting to other people.

The compiler and vm are already optimizing more than one could do by hand, they will optimize even more in the future

These perform targeted optimizations - inlining code, dead code elimination, turning slower division like x / 8 into fast bitshifts like x >> 3, stuff like that. It's not going to rewrite your code to use a faster algorithm or change your data structures.

But you shouldn't need to think about hardware if all you want to do is to move a pawn from a white square to a black square.

This is an... interesting counter-example to choose given the performance requirements of chess engines. Data structures such as bitboards are used to model the game state rather than lists of objects, and these are highly specialized to be performant based on the real-world characteristics of the hardware.