VM creation is using unsafe (the line I pointed out above). You're right, I can't find any deallocation either – but weirdly it /does/ segfault (or sometimes have other memory related errors) if I drop the VM while it's heap is still referenced.

The thing with a tighter bound on the lifetime is that VM carrying a lifetime for itself is fundamentally flawed. A solution would be to remove said lifetime, and have all methods on VM that return lifetimed objects take said lifetime from the reference to the VM.