Adobe Systems is working on a research project intended to make it easier to run programs written in various languages on Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player client runtime.

 With the project, languages like C and C++ can cross-compile to the virtual machine inside Flash and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch at the Adobe Engage event in San Francisco on Monday.

"It's basically a way to take other languages and make them run on top of Flash Player," Lynch said.

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.