Programming in FPC

This page attempts to give an overview of the tools that the Free Pascal compiler puts at your disposal when you are programming.

Tools

Free Pascal comes with several command-line tools that you can use to ease your programming.

Among the tools are a source formatter, a makefile generator, a C header translator, a unit dependency lister and even TP lex and yacc.

The FCL (Free Component Library)

The Free Component Library is meant as a free and portable alternative to Delphi's VCL (Visual Component Library). It is a low-level library, meaning that it doesn't include GUI (graphical) components. It is meant to provide people that implement a GUI with basic routines such as stringlists, streaming, XML routines, Database access and many more things.

It tries to provide as many Delphi-compatible components as possible, to ease porting, but it also presents alternative components that offer different functionality, not found in the Delphi components.

Packages

Free Pascal comes with a series of packages; mainly these are import units for important libraries, or some tools that have been developed by the Free Pascal team.

There are many such packages, they range from GUI packages such as GTK and OpenGL to database packages such as interbase and MySQL.

Downloading

Most of the tools are included with the official releases of the compiler, some of them are not, because they were developed after the compiler release.

The sources of these tools and units can always be downloaded from the development pages or checked out from the CVS server. Compiling should be as easy as typing 'make'.