Hello,

The Free Pascal development team is pleased to announce the availability of version 2.0.0 of the Free Pascal Compiler. This is the new stable version of the compiler and is the first stable release of the development branch of the compiler started back in 2000. OSNews (http://www.osnews.com) will be publishing an article today that will describe the new compiler in detail.

Versions numbered 1.0.X and 1.9.Y are now considered obsolete and will no longer be maintained.

What is Free Pascal ?
=====================

Free Pascal is a compiler for 32-bit and 64-bit CPU architectures such as Intel 32/64 bit, AMD 32/64 bit, SPARC, PowerPC and Intel ARM. It is language compatible to Turbo Pascal, Delphi (till version 7), and partly Metrowerks Pascal. It supports many operating systems: Dos, Linux, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, Novell Netware, Mac OS classic, Mac OS X and MorphOS.

It comes with a cross-platform Run-Time Library, many interfaces to existing libraries, and a large set of non-visual classes in the Free Component Library. Last but not least, a text-mode IDE exists on various platforms, and FPC comes with 1800 pages of documentation.

The compiler is licensed under the GNU General Public License. The Run-Time code is licensed under a modified version of the Library General Public License, which allows to use it in a commercial application.

What is new when compared to version 1.0 ?
==========================================

- More supported CPUs:
AMD64, SPARC, PPC (32 bit), ARM.
- More supported platforms:
Mac OS classic, Mac OS X, MorphOS, Novell Netware.
- Improved inlining
- Improved register variables
- Improved 80x86 assembler optimizer
- Threading support.
- Rudimentary variant support.
- Interfaces support.
- WideString support.
- More Delphi compatibility units.
- Greatly improved database access.
- New compiler mode:
MACPAS for compatibility with Pascal compilers on Mac OS.
- Complete documentation of RTL units, generated using a new documentation tool, included in the distribution: fpdoc
- Completely rewritten Unix support.
- Completely rewritten compiler, allowing for easier ports to new
architectures.
- IDE
- Free Vision text-mode windowing system.
- Many new packages.
- And of course, Numerous bugfixes.

The complete list of changes can be found in the whatsnew.txt file included in the distribution.

Where can it be downloaded ?
============================

The main download site is http://www.freepascal.org/download.html

Here, you can select a mirror close to you. Please select a mirror, as the main server is heavily loaded, but allow some time for the mirrors to be up-to-date.

Installation packages are already available for
- Windows (with installer)
- Linux (Intel x86, AMD64, Sparc, PPC, ARM) : tar.gz and .rpm
- FreeBSD (Intel x86)
- OS/2
- Mac OS X (PPC)
- Mac OS Classic (PPC)
- Netware (Intel x86, native and libc)
Others will follow soon.

What is planned for the future ?
================================

- Fix more bugs.
- Support for dynamic libraries and run-time packages.
- Support for DispInterface (OLE binding on Windows).
- Improved optimizations.
- Improved threading.
- Internal assemblers/linker in the compiler.
- More platforms.
- Better Delphi compatibility.
- Even more documentation.

Enjoy !