[mike_hearn]

You use Java constructs to implement the interpreter, but that doesn't mean the language itself has to be mapped to Java constructs, any more than writing an interpreter in C means your language has to be mapped to C semantics.

Sulong uses a standard C-style heap in the open source version. In EE they (can) trap malloc/free and re-point it towards the GCd heap. They also do bounds checking on pointer de-references. It's actually amazingly cool but unfortunately, EE is expensive enough in dollar terms that it gets ignored. I don't know of anything that uses it for real.