Stephen,

> (*) A nice feature to add to the VM would be the ability to 
> allocate an
> object without the risk of invoking GC (if there's no room, the
> operation just fails).

This would be trivial - all we'd need is a "disableGC" flag in the VM
which could be set by primitives wanting to. In fact I could make good
use of this myself :-)

Cheers,
  - Andreas