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, Haiku Mac OS X/Darwin, DOS, Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, Netware (libc and classic) and MorphOS.

Latest News

January 1st, 2010 Happy New Year!, a new major version 2.4.0 has been released. The 2.4.x series adds, among others,
Downloads are available from the download page (mirrors should follow soon).
A list of changes that may require changes to existing code is available here.

September 17, 2009 (The previously posted information about Mac OS X 10.6 compatibility was unfortunately incorrect, which is why it was removed). FPC 2.2.4 has been tested with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and generally works fine. There is however an issue when compiling dynamic libraries with FPC under Mac OS X 10.6 due to a bug in the Xcode 3.2 linker. Unforuntately, there is no easy fix when using FPC 2.2.4. The full discussion can be found in this bug report, with a summary in the last comment.

Older news...

Current Version

Version 2.4.0 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 2.5.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 mode, largely compatible with Think Pascal and MetroWerks Pascal, is also available. Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and several other extra features.

Requirements

x86 architecture:
For the 80x86 version at least a 386 processor is required, but a 486 is recommended. The Mac OS X version requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later, with the developer tools installed.
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 10.3 or later (can compile for 10.2.8 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 (solaris is experimental).

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.