A system and method for processing virtual machine instructions which supports the software trap methodology. An application programming interface (API) prescribes additional functionality for software traps that remove the processing of recursive virtual machine instructions from virtual machine hardware and instead process recursive virtual machine instructions using software. The additional functionality includes the configuration of a context for processing recursive virtual machine instructions, which enables the virtual machine instructions to access CPU registers to retrieve and modify the values of variables as required, the release of the configured context when processing of recursive virtual machine instructions is completed, and the return of control to a virtual machine for processing non-recursive virtual machine instructions.