Just discovered Adobe Alchemy, which allows C and C++ code to be compiled for the Adobe Flash platform. For me anyway, this shines new light on the Flash platform, as this allows apps to be developed for Flash in widely used general purpose programming languages, which in turn allow the re-use of existing libraries and the sharing of app specific code between the Flash platform and other platforms (like the desktop if you have a standalone client as well as flash client for your service).
This had me wondering if there is a Python equivalent as well, and although I couldn’t find one there is the experimental shedskin that complies Python into C++ and of course there is the PyPy project that can compile Python into C among other things (CLI, JavaScript, etc.). In the future PyPy may be extended to compile Python into AVM2 bytecode, but for now it looks like it would be a trip through C first.
Josh Heitzman on Codecrafting 