The Oberon programming language was proposed in 1987 by Niklaus Wirth as a successor to Pascal and Modula-2. Due to this lineage, Oberon is an ALGOL-like language with strong (static and dynamic) typing discipline. The programming paradigm of Oberon can be classified as imperative, structured, modular, and object-oriented.
This project implements a compiler for the Oberon programming language as a frontend to the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure. It is written in C++ and originated as project accompanying the MSc course "Compiler Construction" taught at the University of Konstanz. As a consequence, this compiler originally only targeted the Oberon-0 subset of the language, as described in Niklaus Wirth's book "Compiler Construction" (Chapter 6, pp. 30-32). Since then, the supported subset of the Oberon has been continuously extended with the goal to eventually cover the full language specification as described in the latest version of the Oberon Language Report. In addition to these "official" extensions, other features were added to the supported dialect of the Oberon programming language. These feature were either inspired by convenience, such as interfacing with standard libraries, or by the compiler author's nostalgia of learning Turbo Pascal 6.0 as his first programming language at high school. A description of the currently supported Oberon dialect in terms of syntax and semantics (of unofficial features) can be found in the Wiki section of this project repository.
Owing to its origin as a course project, care has been taken that the provided C++ sourcecode can be compiled on different operating systems and with different toolchains. Currently the sourcecode only depends on Boost and LLVM. As of August 2023, the following configurations are tested and known to work.
| macOS | Windows | Linux (Ubuntu) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boost | 1.83.0 | 1.83.0 | 1.74.0 |
| LLVM | 17.0.6 | 17.0.2 | 17.0.0 |
| CMake | 3.28.0 | 3.27.0 | 3.26.0 |
| CXX | LLVM Clang 17.0.6 | CL 19.38.33133 | GCC 11.4.0 |
For macOS and Linux, both the x64 and the arm64 version have been tested. Full support for Windows (arm64) is currently under development. Detailed instruction on how to build the Oberon compiler and its dependencies can be found in the Wiki section of this project repository.