Free Pascal

Free Pascal is a 32 bit pascal compiler. Pascal is available for different processors (Motorola 680x0 and Intel 80386 and compatibles) and operating systems (Win32, DOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OS/2, BeOS, SunOS (Solaris), QNX and Classic Amiga).

The language syntax is semantically compatible with TP 7.0 as well as most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings). Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading and other such features.

Here are some key features of "Free Pascal":

· Very clean language Pascal is a very nice language, your programs will be more readable and maintainable than for example in C, and let's even forget about C++. And you don't need to give up the power, the Pascal language is as powerful as you want it.
· No Makefiles Unlike most programming languages, Pascal does not need Makefiles. You can save huge amounts of time, the compiler just figures out itself which files need to be recompiled.
· Pascal compilers are Fast with a big F and Free Pascal is no exception. Yes, you no longer need to grow roots while compiling your programs, just hit the compile key and it's done, even for large programs.
· Each unit has it's own identifiers In Pascal you never need to worry about polluting the namespace, like in C where an identifier needs to be unique accross the entire program. No, in Pascal each unit gets it's own namespace and that's very relaxed.
· Integrated development environment Free Pascal comes with an IDE which work on several platforms, in which you can write, compile and debug your programs. You will save huge amounts of time using the IDE, the best programming friend you have.
· Great integration with assembler Do you think pascal is for wimps who need to learn programming? WRONG! It's excellent for high tech programming and for the supreme nerds among you we have the integrated assemblers. You can easily mix assembler code and Pascal code, in the language you wish? Prefer Intel styled assembler? No problem, if it's needed Free Pascal will convert it to ATT for you. Do you want to convert your program into a source file for Nasm? No problem, and all ATT assembler in your source files is automatically converted.
· Object oriented programming And if you do the serious programming, you are of course very interested in object oriented programming. Use the Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal ways of OOP according to your taste. The FCL and Free Vision and provide you with the powerful object libraries you need. For your database needs we support PostgreSQL, MySQL, Interbase and ODBC.
· Smartlinking Free Pascal's smart linker leaves out any variable or code that you do not use. That makes small programs small with a big S, while they are still statically linked, avoiding DLL hell!
· Distribution independence (Linux) As a result of this, software compiled by the Linux version of Free Pascal runs on any Linux distribution, making it much, much, easier to make your software support multiple Linux distributions.
· Available for a lot of platforms on several architectures Free Pascal is available for more platforms than most other Pascal compilers and allows easy cross-compiling, just change the target in the IDE and compile! And there is work going on for even more platforms and processors.
· Compatible Have existing code? Free Pascal is more compatible with it than any other Pascal compiler. We are almost completely compatible with Turbo Pascal and quite well compatible with Delphi source code. If you have code in another language, like C or assembler, just use favorite compiler for it and call it from Free Pascal.

Requirements:

· At least a 386 processor is required, but a 486 is recommended

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· [IDE] fix the single line glitch issue in XCode syntax highlighting (Jonas Maebe)
· [RTL] SysReAllocMem can corrupt the heap (Micha Nelissen)
· [RTL] SysGetMem_Var never reuses a perfect matching block (Micha Nelissen)
· [Compiler] Updates of German error message files in 2.4.0-RC1 (Marco van de Voort)
· [Documentation] TList.Extract does not, and should not, Notify with lnDeleted (Michael Van Canneyt)
· [Packages] x86_64 fp-units-gfx deb package has wrong content (Abou Al Montacir)
· [Utilities] Patch to fpcmake to consider Haiku as a unix like platform (Marco van de Voort)
· [Packages] For FPC 2.4-rc1 sqlite3 stubs has sqlite3_result_cint insteady of sqlite3_result_int (Marco van de Voort)
· [Documentation] Various grammar & spelling mistakes in ref.tex file (Michael Van Canneyt)
· [Compiler] Loading FPC dylib fails at runtime (Jonas Maebe)
· [Compiler] Bus Error when linking to dylib with Snow Leopard (Jonas Maebe)

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