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Free Pascal Compiler (FPC for short, and formerly known as FPK Pascal^[1]) is a free Pascal and Object Pascal compiler.

In addition to its own Object Pascal dialect, Free Pascal supports, to varying degrees, the dialects of several other compilers, including those of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and some historical Macintosh compilers. Dialect is selected on a per-unit (module) basis, and more than one dialects can be used to produce a single program.

A member of the write once, compile anywhere campaign, Free Pascal is available for many architectures and operating systems (see Targets). It has an excellent support for integration of assembly language, and supports internal assembler in a number of dialects.

Separate projects exist to facilitate the development of cross-platform graphical applications, the most prominent one being the Lazarus IDE.

Supported dialects

Free Pascal adopted the de facto standard dialect of Pascal programmers, Borland Pascal and, later, Delphi. From version 2.0 on, the Delphi 7 compatibility has been continuously implemented or improved.

In fact, the project has a compilation mode concept, and the developers made it clear that they would incorporate working patches for the ANSI/ISO standardized dialects to create a standards-compliant mode.

A small effort has been made to support some of the Apple Pascal syntax, to ease interfacing to Mac OS and Mac OS X. Since the Apple dialect implements some Standard Pascal features that Turbo Pascal and Delphi omit, Free Pascal is a bit more ISO-compatible than these.

The 2.2.x series does not significantly change the dialect objectives beyond Delphi 7, instead they aim for closer compatibility. The project still lacks the Delphi functionality of compiler-supported exporting of classes from shared libraries, which is for example useful for Lazarus, which implements packages of components.

As of 2011^[update] in the current development branch several Delphi 2006-specific features have been added, and some of the starting work for the features new in Delphi 2009 (most notably the addition of the UnicodeString type) has been done. The development branch also features an “Objective-Pascal” extension for Objective-C (Cocoa) interfacing.

The current trunk (2.5.1) version implements basic ISO Pascal mode, though many things such as Get and Put procedure and file buffer variable concept for file handling are still missing.

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