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.
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).
