IronMonkey to let users write Ruby and Python on Tamarin

During Brenden Eich's keynote today at Ajax Experience West (Ajaxian had the scoop), he announced that Mozilla will be creating a projects which I think are hugely significant for the rich internet application world at large and Flash developers in particular. That project is Iron Monkey, which in Brenden's words is "the project to map IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin, so that Tamarin becomes multi-lingual, over time delivering high performance for all languages." So the Mozilla team is looking at making it so developers can code in Python and/or Ruby and have it run against Tamarin, the virtual machine that Adobe uses in Flash and made open source last year. The goal is to allow Ruby and Python devs to code in the language that they know and then have it run anywhere JavaScript runs.

But for Flash developers, I think this is significant because if Mozilla does enable that functionality on top of Tamarin, in theory it might be something we could incorporate into the Flash Player. I like the approach that Microsoft has always taken with .NET and recently the Dynamic Language Runtime; that is, a lot of language support so that developers can use what they want when building applications. I'd love to see more of that in Flash and especially support for Python and Ruby, two very popular dynamic languages. I think this is a great first step and really hope that we (Adobe) can work with closely with Mozilla so that someday we you'll be able to create Flash and AIR applications with Python, Ruby or other languages.

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