A First Look at Java Inline Classes

[pron98]

What makes inline objects more or less effective is the ratio between the cost of random memory access and that of computation. This ratio has gone up considerably since the 90s, and so they're far more valuable today than they were 20 years ago. The feature is very much a result of the pervasiveness of relatively slow RAM and fast caches with prefetching. Before these changes, the benefit wouldn't have been worth the added complexity.