alt Hacker News> it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system
"Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident, but it's also not particularly illuminating. There are dozens of niche operating systems, why do we care about this one in particular? What does it do that other operating systems don't?
Replies
cxr • today at 12:25 PM
> "Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident
> I was about 5 links deep before I figured out what Oberon actually was
You aren't being consistent.
> "Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident,
No, it is not evident: this is not correct.
Oberon is bare-metal self-hosted programming system. It is both a language and an OS.
> why do we care about this one in particular?
1. It is the final development in the career of Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal. Pascal is the Wirthian language that had considerable commercial success.
(A dialect called the USCD p-System was one of the original 3 OSes that IBM offered for the PC, for instance. Apple created Object Pascal, and implemented parts of the Lisa and original Mac OSes in it. In the early days of DOS, Borland TurboPascal was one of the leading IDEs, and then when 16-bit Windows achieved commercial success, Borland's Delphi led the way as the most sophisticated Windows IDE.)
2. It's the end of his life's work. Wirth did not stop with Pascal.
The next generation was Modula. It was a bit of a flop, but the successor, Modula-2, was a hugely influential language too. Topspeed Modula-2 was at one time the fastest compiler of all kinds for the PC.
Development did not end there.
Others did Modula-3, not Wirth. He moved on to create Oberon.
3. This is the end of the line of the single most widespread and influential family of programming languages outside of the C world.
> What does it do that other operating systems don't?
Wirth was a keen advocate of small size and simplicity.
https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf
Oberon is one of the smallest simplest compiled languages of all time. It is also an OS, and an ID, and a tiled mouse-controlled windowing system. The core is about 4000 lines of code.
4k LOC.
The entire core OS is smaller than the tiniest trivial shell tool on any FOSS Unix.
It is almost unbelievably tiny, it is fast, and it is self-hosting. It can run bare-metal, on multiple platforms, or as a conventional language under another OS. It has its own GUI. It can interop with other languages. You can, and people do, build complete GUI apps in Oberon.
https://blackboxframework.org/
It may be less well-known than its own ancestors but this is an important, significant language, and the final generation of a very important and very much alive dynasty.