Comment by justin66
10 years ago
> Oberon was floating in the air for some years, but nothing happened. This was always a mystery to me.
Oberon was an operating system as well as a language, and Oberon was an operating system without processes. Game over.
I mean, there are other cons, like the UI. But in a world where Unix was a done deal, NT and Plan 9 were being spun up, BSD was breaking free and users were happy enough with their Unix, MacOS and Windows machines, Oberon took simplicity too far in a number of ways. (Pascal and Modula-2 were a better bet)
In a weird coincidence I saw that someone is selling an Oberon system today and advertising its single-process nature as a feature. Some kind of networked realtime finance application or something, pretty niche, and who knows if they'll make any money with it.
Look at Singularity project from Microsoft.
It is, from bird's eye view, an operating system with only one process, in managed (as "with garbage collection") language like C#.
Singularity has tons of processes called SIPs and they communicate with each other.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/