For using garbage collection with handles, also check TclJava. It does exactly that and only releases the object for it to be collected by Java when no more references are found to the handle (a string). Apparently this works, to some extent. Here's a brief description and an explanation of one of the problems that Feather would actually have solved:
http://tcl.activestate.com/man/java1.2.6/TclJava/JavaGC.html
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