1. A method comprising: detecting an exception during runtime of execution of a program, triggered by an instruction not supported by a hardware platform on which the program is executing; executing a user-level exception handler instead of a kernel-level exception handler in response to detecting the exception, where the user-level handler is implemented at an application layer, rather than within an operating system kernel; identifying the instruction that triggered the exception; and emulating the instruction that triggered the exception from the user-level exception handler with instructions supported by the hardware platform to enable continued execution of the program.