New version of Free Pascal, 2.6.0

A new stable version has been released of Free Pascal, the open source Delphi and Objective Pascal compatible compiler. The new version, 2.6.0, is the first major release for nearly two years, version 2.4.0 having been released in early 2010.

This latest version now supports Objective Pascal on all Mac OS X and iOS devices. Objective Pascal is a dialect of Pascal developed by the Mac community that enables Pascal to access libraries written in Objective C and includes interfaces to Mac OS X's Foundation, AppKit, CoreData and WebCore system libraries.

Among the other changes, there are also many Delphi compatability mode improvements including support for nested types, for...in enumerators, class and record helpers and improved compatibility with Delphi's general generics syntax. The release sees some improvements in the Mac Pascal and ISO 7185 modes and the OpenGL headers have been updated to OpenGL 4.0. On ARM processors, the compiler now supports the ARM Vector Floating Point (VFP) units versions 2 and 3 and can generate ARM Thumb-2 compatible code.

This latest version of Free Pascal has also added some extensions which could have an impact on the behaviour of existing applications. These and other changes and improvements are described on the project's wiki page.

The Free Pascal compiler is written in Pascal and is capable of self-hosting. It supports a wide range of hardware: ARM, Intel/i386, AMD64/x86_64, PowerPC, PowerPC64 and SPARC. Ready-built packages are available to download, as is the source code, under the terms of the GPLv2 and later versions.

(ehe)