trampoline

n. An incredibly hairy technique, found in some HLL and program-overlay
implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly
generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code
objects to do indirection between code sections. Under BSD and possibly in
other Unixes, trampoline code is used to transfer control from the kernel
back to user mode when a signal (which has had a handler installed) is sent
to a process. These pieces of live data are called trampolines. Trampolines
are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by
those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is
not the true trampoline. See also snap.

