edit, to give you an example. Let's say you have double precision X/Y coordinates. Put that into a class with two double arrays for X and Y. In order to e.g. run an Euclidean distance computation against it, provide a (double, double) -> double interface against it. Then you have either an Euclidean distance class providing that function or just an inline lambda that you can plug into that interface, giving you a distance array. Let's now say you just want to have a list of 10 closes points - instead of sorting you're fastest to brute force it. Only after you reduced it down to the 10 points, you put them into Point objects because there's probably a consumer expecting it that way.
Yes: Java
Performant Java looks mostly like C, just with no manual malloc() calls.
Sure you could write Java in a J2EE way but.. that not a good choice.
All modern VMs (not just limited to Java here!) apply two key optimizations. The first is escape analysis, which checks if references to objects will escape the current function boundary. If not, the objects will be stored on the stack instead of the heap. The second is generational GC, where memory allocation looks like this:
void *new_ptr = heap_mem;
heap_mem += alloc_size;
if (heap_mem >= max_size)
outlined_function_to_get_larger_blocks_of_memory();
Of course at this point the usual answer is just use Rust, but is there a language that meets in the middle? Sometimes I just want the GC to do the work and I'm okay with that.