Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

Post by cxr » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

lproven wrote: post #120

cxr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sparring with you. You are wrong. Oberon is an operating system, and "Oberon is an operating system" is a fair and accurate statement. I don't expect you to relent on this—I'm too well acquainted. You're still wrong.

It is an OS. And it is also a programming language, which can run on other OSes as well as on its own native one. Here's a Windows version: https://blackboxframework.org/ Here's a Linux version too: https://blackbox.oberon.org/download Renamed, but "Component Pascal" is Oberon. Wirth's Oberon is a compiler, but Oberon can also be compiled with other compilers. Vishaps interpiles Oberon via C using GCC, Clang etc. htt…

Premise:

> "Oberon is an operating system"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762184>

Claim #1:

> this is not correct

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763595>

Claim #2:

> It is an OS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47790959>

QED.

* * * *

> You are keen to rebut me

No, I'm really, really not. It would be great if you'd stick to wasting your own time in the future—or, better (esp. if you insist on involving others): only wasting the time of other people like you who would otherwise be doing harm elsewhere.

Post by cxr » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:39 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #38

Rochus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only aware of Brandis’s thesis who did optimizations on a subset of Oberon for the PPC architecture. There was also a JIT compiler, but not particularly optimized. OP2 was the prevalent compiler and continued to be extended and used for AOS, and it wasn't optimizing. To really assess whether a given language can achieve higher performance than other languages due to its special design features, we should actually…

It might have been Brandis' thesis I was primarily thinking about. Of the PhD theses at EHTz on Oberon, I'm also a big fan of Michael Franz' thesis on Semantic Dictionary Encoding, but that only touched on optimization potential as a sidenote. I'm certain there was at least one other paper on optimization, but it might not have been a PhD thesis... I get the motivation for wanting to use LLVM, but personally I don't…

> This paper has presented a study of a system that provides code generation and continuous code optimization as a central system service[…]

> Our results have shown that–because of the profiling feedback loop–object code produced by continuous optimizations is often of a higher quality than can be achieved using static "off-line" compilation. Optimization at runtime, if performed judiciously, can often surpass optimizations performed at compile-time, independent of whether the latter are guided by profiling information or not. Our results have also given evidence that reoptimizing an already running program in response to changes in user behavior can give rise to real performance improvements.

Kistler, Thomas, and Michael Franz. "Continuous program optimization: Design and evaluation." IEEE Transactions on Computers 50, no. 6 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1109/12.931893>

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)