CYcylinder714·Feb 2, 2024
In Juice – Oberon JIT browser plugin (1996)Spirit-of-Oberon
Juice
C2016–2024
Spirit-of-Oberon / Juice
Juice
Juice is a technology for distributing executable content across the World Wide Web
4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
21GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Juice is a technology for distributing executable content across the World Wide Web
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-07-07 00:05:21 UTC to 2024-02-02 08:49:42 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesThis is reminiscent of the technique used by some versions of ETH Oberon to generate native code on module loading from a compressed encoding of the parse tree. Michael Franz described the technique as "Semantic-Dictionary Encoding":
«SDE is a dense representation. It encodes syntactically correct source program by a succession of indices into a semantic dictionary, which in turn contains the information necessary for generating native code. The dictionary itself is not part of the SDE representation, but is constructed dynamically during the translation of a source program to SDE form, and reconstructed before (or during) the decoding process. This method bears some resemblance to commonly used data compression schemes.»
See also "Code-Generation On-the-Fly: A Key to Portable Software"
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6acf/85e7e8eab7c90
Read the rest
89ca1ff24...
This same technique also was used by JUICE, a short-lived browser plugin for running software written in Oberon in a browser. It was presented as an alternative to Java byte code that was both more compact and easier to generate reasonable native code for.
https://github.com/Spirit-of-Oberon/Juice/blob/master/JUICE....
I seem to recall that the particular implementation was quite tied to the intermediate representation of the OP2 family of Oberon compilers making backward compatibility in the face of changes to the compiler challenging and I recall a conversation with someone hacking on Oberon that indicated that he'd chosen to address (trans)portable code by the simple expedient of just compressing the source and shipping that across the wire as the Oberon compiler was very fast even when just compiling from source.
I'm guessing the hard parts are:
(0) Support in enough browsers to make it worth using this format.
(1) Coming up with a binary format that's actually significantly faster to parse than plain text. (SDE managed this.)
(2) Designing the format to not be brittle in the face of change.
There were several versions of the Oberon OS as they explored new languages and hardware. The first relevant here is Native Oberon using original, Oberon language:
http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/native/
They also did one, Active Oberon System, based on a multi-threaded language called Active Oberon. The latest version of that was A2 Bluebottle. I ran its ISO in VirtualBox a year or two ago to get a bare-bones, but fast, experience.
http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads
You might also love the alternate history we missed in the Juice project to replace Java applets (or todays JS apps) with Oberon apps sent as compressed, abstract-syntax trees. If you know how fast Go is, then you'll know what we lost when it got ignored.
https://github.com/Spirit-of-Oberon/Juice
In How to write a simple operating systemOr Oberon http://www.jucs.org/jucs_4_5/open_standards_beyond_java/Fran... (1998).
The tech was released in 1996:
http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm
https://github.com/Spirit-of-Oberon/Juice
https://github.com/berkus/Juice
In Lisp as an Alternative to Java (1999)You might have liked the Juice project:
http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm
Just found a Github page while looking for it where they might have put up the old source:
https://github.com/Spirit-of-Oberon/Juice
In FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation