[r00fus]

Back in my smalltalk days (mid-90s), we used to call this "going below the C level" - take sections of code that need to be optimized, and rewrite them in C as a DLL/shared binary, to be called by the smalltalk native layer.

The % of C code was less than 3%, from what I remember, and C is significantly more verbose than smalltalk, too.

I hear that happened a lot with java as well, using JNI sections for performance purposes (this was before hotspot compiler got decent).