How does FreeOberon compare to FreePascal, in terms of standard library and third party libraries available? Is it a practical development environment, in the sense of not needing to reinvent every wheel to use it?
On a glance it looks pretty limited, I see no way to access OS API, no networking, etc (more or less like Turbo Pascal).
Perhaps sufficient as educational tool.
And of course, modern Pascal compiler like FPC provides OS specific units to do that.
im not sure if sysenter, used on 64bit systems is classed as an interrupt.
the sdk is just a layer on top of that.
ive never used c on dos, it woukdnt surprise me if they used a similar library to linux. theres certainly nothing preventing it.
Actually, that might just be the nostalgia talking.
Has Oberon ever been a thing outside academia? I’ve heard about some Modula2/3 stuff out there in the wild, but not Oberon.
https://www.astrobe.com/order.htm
Ah, very interesting.
Additionally Astrobe sells Oberon-07 compilers for IoT (https://www.astrobe.com/order.htm), for a while XDS also sold Oberon compilers alongside their Modula-2 compilers, and there was a spin-off from ETHZ which sold Component Pascal, basically yet another Oberon dialect.
Studying and using this relatively low-level (but safe!) minimalist language which is not inspired by C has given me quite a few new insights.
I also use it in production code for web-development. It serves as a backend for a high-load interactive website (langauge courses with exercises).