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Is Oberon used anywhere, if so, where? Is it picked for new projects?


Yes, Astrobe is still in business for about 20 years.

https://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

ETHZ still uses Active Oberon somehow,

https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon

This is the owner of that repo,

https://inf.ethz.ch/de/personen/person-detail.MTMyNjc0.TGlzd...

However I do agree it is very niche, one is better of with Go, D, C#, Swift, as modern compiled managed languages with low level language features for systems programming.


It’s used at ETHZ still if you count institutional use.

Commercially it had some popularity in industrial automation and robotics many years ago and some companies still maintain Oberon codebases for this reason. I believe this is the main target market for the commercial Astrobe Oberon compiler for Cortex-M, which sells enough to stick around.

I can’t think of a good reason to start a new commercial product in it and I’m not aware of any new commercial uses, but there are still lots of academic and hobby projects cropping up.


I use it as an example for simplicity enabling expression.

What I mean is if you pick the right primitives to begin with you don’t have to turn a system into horrid spaghetti.

Complexity costs everyone - consumers, people building products and supporting them etc.

And sometimes standardization is the enemy of the simple.

So these things will never be popular as long as committees exist to make our lives miserable.




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