A virtual machine can be extended to be aware of secondary cores and specific capabilities of the secondary cores. If a unit of platform-independent code (e.g., a function, a method, a package, a library, etc.) is more suitable to be run on a secondary core, the primary core can package the unit of platform-independent code (“code unit”) and associated data according to the ISA of the secondary core. The primary core can then offload the code unit to an interpreter associated with the secondary core to execute the code unit.