Have always been fond of Oberon! I would love to have A2/ActiveOberon/BlueBottle or whatever the name of the day is on a small native machine as well.
Great Stuff!
Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
31–40 of 122 posts
Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
#32Does Oberon still require capitalized keywords? That always seemed to be emphasizing the wrong thing:
IF disaster THEN abort;Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ;-)
"Traced back" is fine. We can trace back the size of the Shuttle's boosters to the width of the roads in the Roman Empire. Insisting that the problems of 1960 are the only thing that matters, and MUST be solved dogmatically is not.
Well, a lot of ideas (and I mean really a lot) from the sixties are still very relevant today, and indeed, there are also problems discovered in the sixties still waiting for a solution. We don't have to live in the past, but many "new" things aren't actually new, or are not better just because they are new.
Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
#34Does Oberon still require capitalized keywords? That always seemed to be emphasizing the wrong thing: IF disaster THEN abort;
Yes, the original Oberon (which the system is based on) has upper-case keywords (and some other orthodoxies). If you are looking for something more modern, go to https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon, https://github.com/rochus-keller/luon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron.
Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
#35Have always been fond of Oberon! I would love to have A2/ActiveOberon/BlueBottle or whatever the name of the day is on a small native machine as well. Great Stuff!
Thanks. The A2 Fox compiler actually has an ARM backend, so I would be surprised if nobody has migrated it to the Raspi yet. The 2003 version of AOS/Bluebottle (not A2) is on my list of interesting sytems, particularly because it supports multicore hardware.
Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
#36Earlier 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…
Is anyone attempting to implement Oberon on LLVM IR? Sounds like a fun project
Threre are at least two projects I'm aware of, but I don't think they are ready yet to make serious measurements or to make optimal use of LLVM (just too big and complex for most people).
Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an argument (and I think a good one) that in structured programming there should be only one return per function. It's not that hard -- you just have a variable and you set it to what you want to return and the last line of the function returns that variable. I think that some things Wirth did with Oberon, particularly in the post Oberon-OS versions like Oberon-07, are a bit restrictive, but they are always i…
The problem is that pure structured programming just sucks. It doesn't have a good answers for cleanups or error handling. Structured programming was the answer to the earlier mess with unstructured gotos, but in the process of trying to improve it, structured programming became just as messy when taken dogmatically. In real life, what matters is the mental load. Every ambient condition that you need to track adds me…
It all boils down to the fact that ideas should be viewed as tools rather than dogmas, and famous people are neither infallible nor prophets simply because they had a few good ideas.
Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a couple of PhD theses at ETH Zurich in the 90s on optimizations for Oberon, as well as SSA support. I haven't looked at your language yet, but depending on how advanced your compiler is, and how similar to Oberon, they might be worth looking up.
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 like it (and have the luxury of ignoring it since I only do compilers as a hobby...) and prefer to aim for self-hosting whenever I work on a language. But LLVM is of course a perfectly fine choice if your goal doesn't include self-hosting - you get a lot for free.
Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
#39Earlier 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…
I don’t like LLVM either, because its size and complexity are simply spiraling out of control, and especially because I consider the IR to be a total design failure. If I use LLVM at all, it would be version 4.0.1 or 3.4 at most. But it is the standard, especially if you want to run tests related to the question the fellow asked above. The alternative would be to build a frontend for GCC, but that is no less complex or time-consuming (and ultimately, you’re still dependent on binutils). However, C on LLVM or GCC should probably be considered the “upper bound” when it comes to how well a program can be optimized, and thus the benchmark for any performance measurement.
Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
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