History and Future

The research leading to the design and implementation of Oz began in 1990, when Gert Smolka founded the Programming Systems Lab at DFKI. The first implementation of Oz was operational two years later in September 1992. From there Oz evolved rapidly, until a fixed point was reached in January 1995. The language design is now frozen, with the exception of finite domain constraints. The DFKI Oz system is being improved upon steadily.

Current research issues at DFKI concerning Oz include more efficient implementation, type diagnosis (avoiding a static type discipline), concurrent exception handling, parallel implementation, concepts for distributed programming, and theoretical foundations.