[Oberon] Oberon on ARM/Pi

[Michal Wallace]

On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Richard Hable <informujo at aon.at> wrote:
> On 11/03/12 21:32, Mike McGaw wrote:
>> This thread struck a nerve for me, as I have been an advocate of a virtual machine implementation for the Oberon compiler (see the end of the presentation I made at the last Oberon Day) for some time, now.
>
> Is there a reason why you do not consider the obvious choice: The Java
> VM which is available on just about every machine and provides
> everything an Oberon Runtime System would need, including garbage
> collection and device-independent file and graphics interfaces?

In my case, there are two reasons:

  1. The JVM is an extremely complicated system.
  2. It doesn't run in any of the environments I'd like to target.

I was looking for a very small VM that could run anywhere, including
inside other virtual machines. ( Like atop flash or dot net, or even
the JVM )

But that's just my particular use case. I think in general, an Oberon
system atop the JVM is a pretty sensible idea. There already are at
least two Oberon 2 compilers targeting java:

  http://www.statlab.uni-heidelberg.de/projects/oberon/install/Install.mhc.html
  http://www.uni-vologda.ac.ru/JOB/

The first one appears to be commercial and possibly still in
development. The second appears to be open source, but I couldn't
figure out what license it has...