Stop the Boxing Tax: High-Performance Stream Processing with JEP 455 In 2026, if your agentic telemetry pipeline is still choking on java.lang.Double allocations, you are burning infrastructure budget on garbage collection cycles. We have finally moved past the era where "expressive code" meant sacrificing L1 cache hits for the sake of object-based pattern matching. Why Most Developers Get This Wrong The Wrapper Trap: Relying on Integer or Long objects just to use pattern matching, which triggers massive heap fragmentation in high-throughput streams. Nested If-Else Hell: Writing brittle, unreadable narrowing logic for primitives because they think instanceof only works for reference types. Ignoring GC Pressure: Failing to realize that auto-boxing 100k signals per second in a real-time agentic loop is the primary cause of P99 latency spikes. The Right Way Leverage JEP 455 to treat primitives as first-class citizens in pattern matching and switch expressions without the heap overhead.…