Free Pascal

An open source multi-platform and multi-target Pascal compiler for 32-bit and 64-bit CPU architectures such as Intel 32 bit, AMD 64 bit, SPARC, PowerPC and Intel ARM. It is language compatible with Turbo Pascal, Delphi (up to version 7), and partly compatible with Metrowerks Pascal, ISO Pascal and a few other variants. It supports a number of operating systems as hosts and targets, including DOS, Linux, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, Novell NetWare, Mac OS classic, Mac OS X and MorphOS, although it should be noted that implementation quality and differ widely amongst target platforms.

It comes with a cross-platform Run-Time Library, many interfaces to existing libraries, and a large set of non-visual classes in the Free Component Library. Last but not least, a text-mode IDE exists on various platforms, and FPC comes with more than 1800 pages of documentation.

History
Development of the package started in the latter half of the 1990s and it was then named FPK-Pascal after primary author Florian P. Klämpfl. It has always been notoriously slow in compiling and in code execution vis-a-vis highly optimised commercial competitors, however with modern hardware this is not much of a concern.

Version

 * 1.0.0 (2000-07-30)
 * 1.0.2 (2000-10-19)
 * 1.0.4 (2000-12-31)
 * 1.0.6 (2002-07-10)
 * 1.0.10 (2003-07-11)
 * 2.0.0 (2005)
 * 2.6.4 (2014-03-06)
 * 3.0.0 (2015-11-21)
 * 3.0.4 (Sep 2017)

License
The compiler is open source licensed under the GPL v2.

The Run-Time code is licensed under a modified version of the LGPL v2.1, which allows its use with closed source software, commercial applications or open source software with other licenses.

Articles

 * Free Pascal Compiler Review by Yuri Prokushev (Outdated)

Author

 * Florian P. Klämpfl (Original author), Michaël Van Canneyt
 * Søren Ager (Portions of the TCP/IP socket library)

Links

 * Official Site: http://www.freepascal.org