In 2011 several Delphi 2006-specific features were added in the development branch, and some of the starting work for the features new in Delphi 2009 (most notably the addition of the UnicodeString type) was completed. A notable exception to this was the addition of support for generics to Free Pascal in version 2.2.0, several years before they were supported in any capacity by Delphi. x release series did not significantly change the dialect objectives beyond roughly Delphi 7 level syntax, instead aiming for closer compatibility. The Apple dialect implements some standard Pascal features that Turbo Pascal and Delphi omit.
The project has a compilation mode concept, and the developers made it clear that they would incorporate working patches for the standardized dialects of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to create a standards-compliant mode.Ī small effort has been made to support some of the Apple Pascal syntax to ease interfacing to the Classic Mac OS and macOS. From version 2.0 on, Delphi compatibility has been continuously implemented or improved. Initially, Free Pascal adopted the de facto standard dialect of Pascal programmers, Borland Pascal, but later adopted Delphi's Object Pascal.
6 Examples of software produced with Free Pascal.There are separate projects to facilitate developing cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) applications, the most prominent one being the Lazarus integrated development environment (IDE). It supports inline assembly language and includes an internal assembler capable of parsing several dialects such as AT&T and Intel style. It follows a write once, compile anywhere philosophy and is available for many CPU architectures and operating systems (see Targets).
The dialect is selected on a per-unit (module) basis, and more than one dialect can be used per program.
It supports its own Object Pascal dialect, as well as the dialects of several other Pascal family compilers to a certain extent, including those of Borland Pascal (named "Turbo Pascal" until the 1990 version 6), Borland (later Embarcadero) Delphi, and some historical Macintosh compilers. It is free software released under the GNU General Public License, with exception clauses that allow static linking against its runtime libraries and packages for any purpose in combination with any other software license.
GNU General Public License with static linking exception for the runtime, package, component and other libraries that become part of executables created with the compilerįree Pascal Compiler ( FPC) is a compiler for the closely related programming-language dialects Pascal and Object Pascal. GNU General Public License for the compiler and utility executables.