I haven't heard about Optane before, but the concept of persistent memory reminds me of PhantomOS[0], which is based around the idea that from the app perspective everything is already in memory and the kernel/runtime (JVM-ish, so object-aware) takes care of {,de}serialization to a non-volatile storage by virtue of a highly sophisticated virtual memory manager so the app programmer doesn't have to think about it. I remember seeing it being presented at some conference around 2012 and the live demo running Tetris game slowed down to a crawl and crashed after a few blocks due to bugs in GC.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_OS