trampoline An incredibly hairy technique, found in some HLL and program-overlay implementations (e.g. on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. These pieces of live data are called "trampolines". Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also snap.
[Jargon File] Last updated: 2003-03-26
