RochusShow HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native/releases
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.
Smalltalk too was originally a full OS running on bare metal back in the Xerox Alto days (1972-ish).
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.
It's refreshing to see Oberon getting some love on the Pi. There’s a certain 'engineering elegance' in the Wirthian school of thought that we’ve largely lost in modern systems.
While working on a C++ vector engine optimized for 5M+ documents in very tight RAM (240MB), I often find myself looking back at how Oberon handled resource management. In an era where a 'hello world' app can pull in 100MB of dependencies, the idea of a full OS that is both human-readable and fits into a few megabytes is more relevant than ever.
Rochus, since you’ve worked on the IDE and the kernel: do you think the strictness of Oberon’s type system and its lean philosophy still offers a performance advantage for modern high-density data tasks, or is it primarily an educational 'ideal' at this point?