DirectByteBuffer would allow direct pointer access to the backing memory. When used with allocateDirect, you can rely on Java's GC to manage the memory. Not sure if it's a perfect fitnfor the use case but it's simpler to reason about.

DirectByteBuffer exhibits an intriguing behavior: it deallocates its backing memory during the finalization process, which occurs after garbage collection cycles. This poses an issue if your system is conservative with on-heap allocations, leading to infrequent GC cycles. In such cases, there could be a significant delay between the time the memory becomes unreferenced and when it is actually deallocated. This behavior could, in some respects, mimic a memory leak.

This is why some libraries hacks into DirectByteBuffer to deallocate memory explicitly, bypassing the finalizer altogether. For instance, the Netty library has implemented such a workaround: https://github.com/netty/netty/blob/795db4a866401aa172757b95...