Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card) (github.com)
121 points by Rochus 7 hours ago
spijdar 3 hours ago
Oh, this is something I'm going to have to try. Excellent work!
I have to ask, since people who'd know will probably be here, what's the "ten thousand foot view" of Oberon today? I'm aware of the lineage from Pascal/Modula, and that it was a full OS written entirely in Oberon, sort of akin to a Smalltalk or Lisp machine image. What confuses me is the later work on Oberon seems to be something of a cross between a managed runtime like Java or dot net, and the Inferno OS, where it can both run hosted or "natively". Whenever I've skimmed the wikipedia or web pages I've been a bit confused.
Rochus 3 hours ago
Thanks. In contrast to Smalltalk or Lisp, Oberon is originally a native language, and the Oberon System originally was conceived as the native operating system of the Ceres computer used for teaching in the nineties at ETH Zurich. So there is no image as in Lisp or Smalltalk. Oberon lives on today in the form of various dialects and derivatives (such as my Oberon+ or Micron languages, see https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon and https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron). There are indeed Oberon implementations which run on Java or ECMA 335 runtimes, which is possible due to the very restricted pointer handling and memory management of Oberon.
foruhar 3 hours ago
Smalltalk too was originally a full OS running on bare metal back in the Xerox Alto days (1972-ish).
Rochus 3 hours ago
The "OS" (or rather "kernel") was actually the VM which was implemented in microcode and BCPL. The Smalltalk code within the image was completely abstracted away from the physical machine. In today's terms it was rather the "userland", not a full OS.
EffCompute 2 hours ago
dharmatech 2 hours ago
The Oberon user interface inspired Acme on Plan 9.
Oberon is a very nice, fun and cozy system and environment for programming. I lived in it for a few months back around 2010 and it was a joy.
eterps 6 hours ago
This is great! I remember running System 3 on a 386 back when MS-DOS was king.
Rochus 4 hours ago
Thanks. There is actually also an i386 version of the system in the repository, where I modified the kernel so it runs with Multiboot, making installations much easier. An essential achievement for both platforms were the stand-alone tools, i.e. I can compile and link the whole Oberon system on Linux or any other platform (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/op2/). I even implemented an IDE which I used for the development (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/activeoberon/).
ike____________ 4 hours ago
Thank you, I've never heard of the Oberon os before.
Rochus 3 hours ago
Oberon is both a programming language and an operating system used mostly for teaching, much like e.g. xv6 or xinu. Similar to the latter, Wirth has written text books about the system, some of which can be downloaded for free (see https://projectoberon.net/ for the PDF links).
tomcam 4 hours ago
So good to see Oberon this accessible! Mad props!
alterom 2 hours ago
I still hope to see the world where Oberon is the future (and present) of OS and programming language design, and I know very little about it.
Thanks to your work, that's about to change.
Thank you times a thousand <3
cyberax 2 hours ago
> I still hope to see the world where Oberon is the future (and present) of OS and programming language design
I see you're into horror stories.
Oberon is absolutely a horrible language. It's an example of how you can screw up a good language by insisting on things that were important in 1960-s.
Like not allowing multiple returns (not multiple return _values_ but multiple returns).
Rochus 28 minutes ago
Show me significant concepts implemented in today's languages which cannot directly be traced back to "things that were important in 1960-s" or seventies ;-)