Code Reggae

The first version of Oberon was created at the end of 80-ies and the beginning of 90-ies. Niklaus Wirth was back then a well-known and influential figure in Computer Science. His work was open source, well described, and available for download. But time went by and the system did not leave the academic world and his university. Even the German-speaking world seems not to pick it up. So, why? And why should we even pay an attention to this system? First of all, what is Oberon and what is its goal? It was created as an illustration for the Operating Systems course and exercise in building an operating system that can be fully understood by a good student. The whole system was built originally by one man from scratch. So, it is fantastically compact. It allows for extension, and simultaneously it also allows for the reduction of all the code that is not currently used. It is amazingly reliable. It is lightning fast. But it is not widely used and not even widely known. It seems to have its...

 After the previous post, I was looking at Oberon-related stuff. Seems that a couple of ideas are still alive - Active Oberon, both operating system and language.  There is an unofficial GitHub mirror of the  Active Oberon working group. Active Oberon team still uses svn, so the unofficial mirror is updated only from time to time. The Github mirror has several builds - I tried the linux64, and everything seems to work just fine.  I even found there an ARM version of the compiler and Active Oberon for an ARM-based board . And this is extremely interesting - because this world does not have a good real-time OS for "embedded" programming. If Oberon can be used for this purpose - it can be a  success. But in order to be successful, someone should port several utilities (well - the simplest version of shell and sshd comes to mind first) and, probably, several C libraries to A2OS (as they call the Active Oberon OS now).  It seems to be really ready for cross-co...

Found today my old and abandoned blog ... I was playing with Rust a couple of years ago, started Redox in VM, wrote a small web app, etc. To support that leisure activity I started that blog - never wrote anything after the first post. Recently (a couple of days ago) I decided to play with Rust and, mostly, Redox. I tried to start Redox on bare metal, and created a bootable USB stick for v 0.7, but was unsuccessful. I have a couple of old laptops, Redox boots on both of them, but hangs when trying to switch to graphic mode. Most likely it is missing video drivers for those laptops. So, Rust/Redox first try was unsuccessful. ____________________________________________________________________________________ So, I looked at other operating systems. First of all - the Oberon family. A good description can be found here (progtools)  Now I am planning to create a USB stick for Active Oberon and boot it up. I will also read the latest Wirth books referenced here . I learn from his books...