[Oberon] Slim Binaries - what happened ?

[Peter H.Froehlich]

Hi!

On Sunday, October 6, 2002, at 09:59 , Bernhard Treutwein wrote:

> As far as I understand, OMI is now history and not implemented in the
> current ETH Oberon system, although it referenced heavily in the
> "Oberon Companion".
> I ask myself, why did is it dead ?

One reason might be that there is nobody left to really work on it. 
Thomas Kistler used to do it while at UCI, but since he left for 
industry the whole Oberon arm of the research done at UCI under 
Michael Franz is pretty much dead. Focus has shifted on Java and 
general technologies that apply to a broader variety of languages.

> If I understand the compiler genealogy 
> (http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/compiler/)
> correct, I guess that OMI has never been updated to the "enhanced" 
> features
> Patrik Reali implemented. Is there any principle problem with that ?

I don't think that there is a major problem, but it does not make 
sense to ship things that are not portable (like inline assembly) 
in Slim Binaries. All other language extensions should be fairly 
easy to add. I see the major "obstacle" in motivation: I don't 
think anyone *needs* a portable binary format. You can get 
everything in source anyway and just recompile. It's not like there 
is a working "component market" for Oberon, which has a fairly 
small (yet cool!) community anyway.

But that's just my take. If you would be interested in following up 
on Slim Binaries and integrating the idea with current versions of 
the Oberon System you should probably become a graduate student or 
researcher with Michael Franz. :-)

Peter
--
Peter H. Froehlich <><><><><><> http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~phf/
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