[amalcon]

Hah, now you've got me thinking about how one might technically satisfy that requirement. None of the possibilities I've come up with are good ideas.

[koide]

You will very likely need real time guarantees the JVM does not provide. (The "off the shelf" bit's a hint)

[amalcon]

Absolutely correct. I was thinking of things along the lines of "use JDK 1.2, which still lets you turn off the garbage collector, and then spend 100% of your time after startup in a JNI module." That's the least scary version.

[dllthomas]

What about "Use java code to output C code; compile C code; run C code."?

[doktrin]

From an interviewer's perspective, that answer wouldn't really help me gauge your familiarity and depth of understanding with regards to the JVM (which is, presumably, something I'd be very interested in knowing).

[dllthomas]

That's a good point.