The present invention is directed at a virtual machine environment operating on portable devices with limited resources. The virtual machine environment includes a method for compiling an intermediate language into native code wherein the native code is stored in a directly addressable and executable storage medium, such as flash memory. A portion of the native code is written to a cache resident in volatile memory during compiling. The cache is written to the directly addressable and executable storage medium. The cache may be sized in relation to a block size associated with the directly addressable and executable storage medium. A metadata map is maintained and associates a physical address at which the native code is stored in the storage medium with the method. The native code is persisted by storing the metadata map in the storage medium and associating the metadata map with the method.