Free Pascal Is Not a Social Cause! The Story of Open Source Pascal

Free Pascal or FPC is an open source Pascal compiler that is available for free. It is portable, and it functions as a multi-operating system compiler. Furthermore, it integrates 32/64 bit multi-architecture, and it can implement dialects like Delphi, Turbo Pascal, and Mac Pascal. It is available for a wide variety of processors, such as Amd64/x86, Intel x86, ARM, PowerPC, and Sparc, as well as a wide range of operating systems, such as Mac OS, Linux, DOS, FreeBSD, Win32, Win64, X/Darwin, Morph OS, WinCE, and OS/2.

It was Borland ’s decision to discontinue Borland Pascal 8 that led to the creation of Free Pascal . Borland went ahead to develop a Windows-only product which became known as Delphi. At the outset, Free Pascal was called FPK Pascal, which stood for the name of its author, Florian Paul Klämpf. Florian Paul Klämpfl worked on this compiler with the use of the Turbo Pascal dialect. In 1997, however, the name was changed to FPC or Free Pascal Compiler . Initially, the compiler was a 16-bit DOS executable which went on to become 32-bit after two years. The DOS version kept improving with subsequent versions, leading to its migration to the ‘go32v2 extender’. The 0.99.5 release of Free Pascal integrated the go32v2 extender, and it soon became the most popular Free Pascal version. By the year 2000, a stable version of Free Pascal 1.0.x series became available, and people began to use this version increasingly for enterprise and educational purposes. The later releases facilitated Turbo Pascal and even Delphi compatibility modes.

A text mode IDE which is similar to that of Turbo Vision of Turbo Pascal is included in Free Pascal. Although the IDE had occasional bug issues, it was later fixed, and this made Free Pascal IDE suitable for release again in 2006. Another similarity between Free Pascal and Turbo Pascal is the support for assembly language integration in Object Pascal as well as Pascal code. Just like Turbo Pascal, Free Pascal ably supports notations and multiple architectures. It is also occasionally utilized by pos systems.

Free Pascal’s language syntax is compatible with that of Delphi’s versions, including widestrings, ansistrings, classes, rtti, exceptions, and interfaces, as well as TP 7.0’s. There is even a Mac Pascal mode which is compliant with Think Pascal and MetroWerks Pascal. Among a host of features that Free Pascal supports are operator overloading, function overloading, and global properties.

In 2006, another overhaul was planned for the Free Pascal version 2.0 compiler. One of the priorities was to stabilize the features of Free Pascal. A few important features, such as DWARF and support for Windows CE, Win64, and Mac OS X, were also integrated in this release.

Ever since its release, Free Pascal has been utilized for the creation of educational, retail and corporate software in addition to several popular application software, such as Pixel Image Editor, Peazip, Morgik, Audio X , MRIcron, and QFront. Stable versions of Free Pascal were released in September, 2007 and August, 2008. These versions, Version 2.2.0 and Version 2.2.2 , significantly improved the OLE support, ActiveX/COM, and the interface. Free Pascal version 2.3.x is currently under development, and it will include some new features along with support for FreeBSD/x86_64, Mac OS X 64-bit, and the Symbian OS.