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Paul Krill picked up on Kevin Lynch saying "It's basically a way to take other languages and make them run on top of Flash Player" as he answered a question from the audience at Engage the other night.

Expanding on the project, Ted Patrick, Adobe technical evangelist, said the technology would allow for cross-compiling existing code from C, C++, Java, Python, and Ruby to ActionScript. This would enable components written in those languages to be integrated into a larger project, Patrick said. "That code becomes perfectly portable into our application platform," he said.

For example, an alternative PDF renderer providing a lighter version of PDF could be cross-compiled, and the Flash Player could read it and display PDFs.

"Right now, everything has to be written in ActionScript or our lower level byte code languages," said Patrick.

In Flash Player, everything has to compile down to SWF byte code, Patrick said. The byte code language inside SWF is called ActionScript byte code.

Of course, this has been talked about quite some time ago. As Tamarin grows up and becomes a solid VM, we are likely to see the polyglot come to being in full force.