Nagging Native Bits - ImageLoader

I have seen a few posts on the forum about sage crashing out unexpectedly - seemingly tied to image management in some way (screensaver seems to be the common cause). What is sage gaining from doing imageloading, and especially scaling, in native code? This seems to needlessly complicate the issue, and I think we'd end up quite a bit more stable if we could roll this stuff into java. I think I'd take a slight performance hit over a unrecovered crash - though I wonder if newer java api's have made the need to go native for this obsolete.

A forum search for "native imageloader" presents a list of 'random crash' events stretching back about a decade.