The developer annotates specific functions or code blocks using:

Marked functions are not compiled to native code immediately. Instead, the VMProtect compiler (v3comp.dll) extracts the native instructions and replaces them with a VM entry stub.

No protector is perfect, and VMProtect 3.4.0 has known limitations:

For companies selling algorithm libraries (e.g., compression, cryptography, AI inference engines), shipping a DLL protected by VMProtect makes extraction of the raw algorithm significantly harder than static obfuscation.

The primary selling point of VMProtect is its ability to virtualize code.

Prior to virtualization, Build 1155 applies a mutation pass: