The Oberon System Family

Oberon simultaneously refers to a modular, extensible operating system and an object-oriented programming language developed for its implementation. Although the original Oberon System had been conceived as the native operating system for a custom-built workstation, further implementations for several commercial platforms were developed later and are described here. All of these implementations are based on an efficient, retargetable Oberon compiler, and each provides a complete Oberon environment and the original library interface. This paper describes the structure of the compiler, summarizes the experience gained in adapting it for various CISC and RISC processors, and presents some empirical performance data. It also sheds light on the task of grafting an operating environment onto a variety of existing operating systems.