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Introduction
Overview
Free Pascal (aka FPK Pascal) is a 32 and 64 bit professional Pascal compiler. It is available for different processors: Intel x86, Amd64/x86_64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, Sparc, ARM. The discontinued 1.0 version also supports the Motorola 680x0. The following operating systems are supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin, Mac OS classic, DOS, Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, Netware (libc and classic) and MorphOS.
Latest News
May 5, 2008 Currently, one of the machines hosting part of the FPC and Lazarus project is down/broken. This affects the wiki, snapshots, partly ftp and the mailing lists. Due to the long weekend the restoration takes longer than expected but this is nothing to worry about and we are working on getting it back.
April 23, 2008 Morfik has unveiled version 2 of their web-development platform, named simply M2. The Morfik IDE uses Free Pascal as the back-end compiler to compile the server-side of the web applications.
September 10, 2007 OS-News placed an article about the new FPC compiler and cross-platform development. A Dutch version is available on our Wiki.
September 10, 2007 The Free Pascal Compiler team is pleased to announce the release of FPC 2.2.0!
An overview of most changes is available here, but some highlights are:
- Architectures: PowerPC/64 and ARM support
- Platforms: Windows x64, Windows CE, Mac OS X/Intel, Game Boy Advance, and Game Boy DS support
- Linker: fast and lean internal linker for Windows platforms
- Debugging: Dwarf support and the ability to automatically fill variables with several values to more easily detect uninitialised uses
- Language: support for interface delegation, bit packed records and arrays and support for COM/OLE variants and dispinterfaces
- Infrastructure: better variants support, multiple resource files support, widestrings are COM/OLE compatible on Windows, improved database support
The release notes can be found here.
Downloads are available at http://www.freepascal.org/download.var
Current Version
Version 2.2.0 is the latest stable version the Free Pascal. Hit the download link and select a mirror close to you to download your copy. The development releases have version numbers 2.3.x. See the development page how to obtain the latest sources and support development.
Features
The language syntax has excellent compatibility with TP 7.0 as well as with most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces). A Mac Pascal compatibility mode is also provided to assist Apple users. Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and other such features.
Requirements
x86 architecture:For the 80x86 version at least a 386 processor is required, but a 486 is recommended.PowerPC architecture:
Any PowerPC processor will do. 16 MB of RAM is required. The Mac OS classic version is expected to work System 7.5.3 and later. The Mac OS X version requires Mac OS X 10.1 or later, with the developer tools installed. On other operating systems Free Pascal runs on any system that can run the operating system.ARM architecture
16 MB of RAM is required. Runs on any ARM Linux installation.Sparc architecture
16 MB of RAM is required. Runs on any Sparc Linux installation.
License
The packages and runtime library come under a modified Library GNU Public License to allow the use of static libraries when creating applications. The compiler source itself comes under the GNU General Public License. The sources for both the compiler and runtime library are available; the complete compiler is written in Pascal.