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I know it's not industry, but as an aside, Oberon (an OO successor to Pascal also designed by Wirth and his team) was used to write BlueBottle OS at ETH Zurich.
by KMag 7y ago
I know it's not industry, but as an aside, Oberon (an OO successor to Pascal also designed by Wirth and his team) was used to write BlueBottle OS at ETH Zurich. All of userspace and most of the kernel was written in Oberon.
I've played around with BlueBottle inside Qemu. One interesting feature is that userspace programs are compiled to compressed syntax trees and JIT-compiled by the dynamic linker/loader at runtime. The very slow disk drives used by the ETH Zurich workstations, combined with the relatively little amount of optimization performed by Wirth-style compilers, meant that the savings in disk I/O time was greater than the cost of JITting, so it was a net performance win. One of Wirth's graduate students went on to develop this idea further by developing SafeTSA, a similar idea, but pushing more of the work into the ahead-of-time compiler by switching from compressed syntax trees to compressed static-single-assignment control flow graphs.
- pjmlp 7y agoSmall correction, BlueBottle uses Active Oberon, not plain Oberon.