When Microsoft released Silverlight the one feature that got a lot of people excited was that you could use the language you were most familiar with to build a RIA. Apparently Adobe has an internal project which allows any C or C++ code to run in the Flash Player or on AIR. This means that any language built on C/C++ will also run which means that Java, Python, and my beloved Ruby could also run. Schwing!

Ted is a Python guy so he talks about IronPython and JPython but of course Ruby has JRuby and IronRuby so I’m sure the behavior would be similar.

Like many organizations Adobe has lots of legacy C/C++ code ranging from PhotoShop filters, to PDF renderers, to readers and writers of every file format in existence, font libraries, to very complex vector renderers, and text layout code. Beyond Adobe there are many open source libraries that could be leveraged as components as well. The big thing for me is that these are not ports of these libraries, they run identical to the original source code down. For example the behavior of Python in Flash Player is identical to C-Python vs the ported behavior under the IronPython and Jython projects. The goal here is to bring lots of these legacy assets, code libraries, and languages into Flash Player and Adobe AIR perfectly so that any developer can leverage them cross-platform to build software. It would not shock me to see some of these components added into the Flash Player component cache so that they essentially are built into the player on first use.

InfoWorld has more.

Of course, the application release comes hot on the heels of Michael Arrington saying that Silverlight from Microsoft was going to make “Flash/ Flex look like an absolute toy”. Apparently that wasn’t too accurate, because the Yahoo Messenger team chose Flex for the web UI, despite the fact that they have already been working on a WPF version of Messenger for Vista.

That WPF version may see the light of day again if Microsoft buys Yahoo!.