Free Pascal (FPC for short) is a free, portable and open source compiler for Pascal and Object Pascal. It is a 32/64-bit multi-architecture and multi-operating system compiler that implements the Borland Pascal dialects—Turbo Pascal and Delphi—as well as some Mac Pascal constructs, and is available for most common operating systems.

Free Pascal used to be known as FPK Pascal, where FPK are the initials of the author Florian Paul Klämpfl. The name of the project was changed to Free Pascal Compiler, or FPC for short, at the end of 1997.

Free Pascal comes with a text mode IDE resembling Turbo Pascal's IDE (Turbo Vision). This IDE deteriorated for some time because of a missing maintainer, but in a common effort in the second half of 2005 and the first months of 2006, most major bugs were fixed and the IDE became release-worthy again.

Like Turbo Pascal and Delphi, Free Pascal has an excellent support for integration of assembly language in the Pascal/Object Pascal code. Free Pascal supports multiple architectures and notations in the internal assembler.

The visual parts of the Delphi libraries, i.e. the VCL, and the creation of a visual IDE and RAD are part of a separate project, called Lazarus.


See also: Lazarus, Delphi


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