It's worth looking at Mark Roos's talks about RTalk which is a port of Smalltalk to the JVM to support some existing commercial software. It compiles JVM byte c

It's worth looking at Mark Roos's talks about RTalk which is a port of Smalltalk to the JVM to support some existing commercial software. It compiles JVM byte code from existing Smalltalk bytecode, and keeps the images if I remember correctly. In the language I work on we do use JVM classes, but our own methods tables are used to model the inheritance hierarchy, and methods are all static JVM methods under the hood so we can support all the meta programming that you'd expect in a Smalltalk inspired language.