Broad agreement in general, but I would observe there are still use cases for non-bare-metal languages for mmap. It doesn't conflict with all VMs. Haskell could use it (it actually has surprising interfacing capabilities on this front), Google says OCaml can use mmap though AFAIK it has a less useful threading story, Lua can probably productively use it though again I'm unclear on the threading. Erlang can't use it out-of-the-box but conceptually it could be modelled as a port, though again whether you could get a performance win I don't know. Mono and the JVM could use it, though again, primitive threading story. Python and Perl have interfaces to them but you sacrifice so much performance simply by using them that yeah, it doesn't much matter. But at least in theory there are VMs that can productively use it.