Nice project. Reminds me of how Squeak makes use of Assembly

http://www.squeaksource.com/@us0cp9R3z2kMAiPd/FB3wRHMZ

How large a chunk of assembly is needed to balance out the JNI overhead? And are you keeping an eye on Panama so you can do this insane thing faster? :-)

I'm not sure yet and I'm very interested in this problem, although it may be JVM-specific. I have not read much on Panama, but will definitely check it out.

Looks good. I imagine it can switch assembly code on the fly based on runtime check.

Yep! It's in the works and not pushed yet, but depending on the architecture you're running on, you should be able to execute different blocks of assembly (or fall back to a Java-implemented method if nothing matches your architecture).

Do individual instructions need to be passed one at a time, you may as well accept multi line programmes..

An entire block is passed to the JNI bridge at one time; specifically, when invoke() is called. It essentially is a function (and must follow the calling conventions of the platform).

What's something really cool you could do with this?