Systems and methods that adapt software components encoded for execution by a virtual machine to the specific architecture of a target platform are provided. These systems and methods combine the portability benefits of a virtual machine architecture with the power conservation and computation efficiency benefits normally associated with native implementations. More particularly, in some embodiments, a compiler configured to compile software components encoded for execution by a virtual machine is enhanced to identify hardware processing elements available on a target platform and to adapt the software components to utilize the identified hardware processing elements. In at least one embodiment, the adaptation performed by the enhanced compiler takes the form of compression or extension.