Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5

#21

Post by Rochus » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 10:14 AM UTC

OCTAGRAM wrote: post #20

Rochus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The availability of the board to run Wirt's system was an issue pretty soon. There were even people who offered their own boards to fill the gap (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20160831063355/http://oberonstat... ). My system version instead runs on RISC-V, so no custom FPGA implementation, currently on an emulator, but eventually on the ESP32 (which has a much better availability).

What do you think about ClockworkPi uConsole Kit R-01, ClockworkPi DevTerm Kit R-01, OrangePi?

I have mostly experience with the smaller (older) boards of OrangePi, and I think they have great boards, some even with a long availability.

Re: Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5

#22

Post by mikethe » Sun, Aug 16, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

I am currently exploring languages, operating systems.. my conclusions so far are that the two fish in the pond are plan9, and oberon. I am also aware of Geoff Collyers criticisms of RISC-V, and the criticisms of oberon of principia-softwarica. But that's about where my knowledge ends. I am also extremely suspicious of any project that makes any use of c++, being familiar with both the art of unix programming, and the attitudes of the suckless community.

A brief glance at https://oberon-lang.github.io/2023/12/25/towards-concurrency... tells me that oberon+ supports parallelism, so I take that to mean that the criticisms in principia-softwarica no longer completely hold, at least for that new language.

Something that really surprises me is, a project so closely connected to the simplicity and elegance of oberon, also connected to c++, a language so widely vilified for complexity and ugliness, and with which oberon itself, apparently, competes. I'm sure there must be really good reasons for all this.

Re: Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5

#23

Post by mikethe » Sun, Aug 16, 2026, 10:26 PM UTC

mikethe wrote: post #22

I am currently exploring languages, operating systems.. my conclusions so far are that the two fish in the pond are plan9, and oberon. I am also aware of Geoff Collyers criticisms of RISC-V, and the criticisms of oberon of principia-softwarica. But that's about where my knowledge ends. I am also extremely suspicious of any project that makes any use of c++, being familiar with both the art of unix programming, and th…

I should make this clearer.

On the one hand, the art of unix programming claims that object-orientation only succeeds at solving certain problems by creating something sufficiently complex that the human mind can barely cope. Then I read that oberon solves problems that c can't solve, while claiming to be better than c++. Then I read, in principia, that oberon is only simplified by getting rid of all the really interesting and valuable functionality that is in plan9.

So the questions: is that functionality really necessary, or is oberon really all we need? and.. what would a plan9 system written in object-oriented oberon look like? in oberon+ with concurrency/parallelism? would this result in a better system than the current plan9? And what about safer languages like ada? (rust being based on c++, and therefore not being a real contender..)

Re: Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5

#24

Post by mikethe » Sun, Aug 16, 2026, 11:57 PM UTC

mikethe wrote: post #23

mikethe wrote: post #22

I am currently exploring languages, operating systems.. my conclusions so far are that the two fish in the pond are plan9, and oberon. I am also aware of Geoff Collyers criticisms of RISC-V, and the criticisms of oberon of principia-softwarica. But that's about where my knowledge ends. I am also extremely suspicious of any project that makes any use of c++, being familiar with both the art of unix programming, and th…

I should make this clearer. On the one hand, the art of unix programming claims that object-orientation only succeeds at solving certain problems by creating something sufficiently complex that the human mind can barely cope. Then I read that oberon solves problems that c can't solve, while claiming to be better than c++. Then I read, in principia, that oberon is only simplified by getting rid of all the really inter…

I am in discussion now with a colleague on the subject of c++/rust, so there will be greater clarity on that soon.