We did, but not in this project. :-) This is indeed more like an embedded JVM, not totally unlike early J2ME, but with x86_64 instead of JVM instructions.
not at all a critique on your project, if that was the impression I gave :)
I'm old enough to remember when Java applets were invented, grew up using Visualage Smalltalk on OS/2 at school, and am still bitter that nobody ever said: but this is Smalltalk, why don't we use Smalltalk then? :)
Because Smalltalk big supporters like IBM, decided to repurpose their Smalltalk offerings into Java.
Visual Age Smalltalk had a role similar to .NET on the OS/2 ecosystem, SOM (OS/2 version of COM) supported Smalltalk, implementation inheritance and meta-classes, so yeah it didn't help to go full on Java.
Also another Visual Age thing, Visual Age for C++ v4 also had a Smalltalk like experience for C++, unfortunely it was too demanding in resources.
Ruby is more like Smalltalk.