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  • > The whole system runs on a low-cost development board (Xilinx Spartan-3 by Digilent, with 1 MB of static RAM)

    If somebody wants their FPGA work to be available, they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning. Costlier, but way more likely to be found around.

    by OCTAGRAM
  • > they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning.

    Well, the MiSTer project was yet 4 years from being launched back in 2013 when the RISC-5 was implemented in FPGA, so I hope you'd excuse Wirth from not choosing it.

    by Joker_vD
  • 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).

    by Rochus
  • what does RISC-V instead of RISC-5 mean?
    by tosh
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC5
    by tosh
  • Would it be practical to have the ESP P4 self-host?
    by clbrmbr
  • The ESP32-P4 is actually my target platform. I have a cross-compiler toolchain based on my own OP2 compiler version (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/op2/) which makes it easier to migrate. The Project Oberon System is an "intermezzo" for my actual goal, the Oberon System 3; the latter can also run my OP2 version and would thus be able to self-host. I didn't try yet to run OP2 under the Project Oberon System, but with some patience I assume it is feasible.
    by Rochus
  • 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.

    by mikethe
  • 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..)

    by mikethe
  • Love your commitment to this. You are doing excellent work to keep Wirth's computing spirit alive. Oberon's philosophy ( https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.Report.pdf ) is beautiful for the power it hides behind its simplicity and I wish it was a more popular language ...
    by thisislife2
  • Thanks. Though I migrated the code from Oberon-07 to Oberon 90 (so I could compile it with my OP2 version) and currently I even migrate it to my forthcoming Micron language. The Project Oberon System is very well suited for these kinds of experiments.
    by Rochus
  • Readers encountering this project for the first time should be aware that the earlier Oberon-on-RISC-V project <https://github.com/solbjorg/oberon-riscv> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25497002>) exists and was already discussed on the mailing list:

    <https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2026/017161.html>

    by cxr
  • People unaware of Project Oberon should rather have a look at https://projectoberon.net/ where they can find the free book and additional material by Prof. Wirth.
    by Rochus