[fpc-pascal]FPC Version 1.9.4 released.

[Michael Van Canneyt]

Hello,

The FPC team is pleased to announce that version 1.9.4 has been
uploaded on the web. Version 1.9.4 is a pre-release of the upcoming
version 2.0. However, the FPC team believes that the quality is
sufficient for production work: version 1.9.4 scores significantly
better in the testsuite than the official 1.0.10 version.

Versions have been uploaded for the following platforms:
- BSD (FreeBSD)
- Linux (Intel,PowerPC hardware)
- Win32
- Mac OS X (PowerPC hardware)
Versions for other supported platforms may follow, depending
on available time/enthousiasm.

The new release can be downloaded from our website:
http://www.freepascal.org/sdown.html
Please select a mirror near you, as bandwidth is limited.

The FPC Wiki contains a page which shows what is in store for the
upcoming 2.0 release:
http://www.freepascal.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Road_to_2.0

The list of changes in this 1.9.4 release is appended to this mail.
The complete list of changes since version 1.0.10 can be found in the
whatsnew.txt file in the distribution.

Enjoy !

The FPC team.

******************************************************************************
                      Whats New in 1.9.4 aka 2.0.0-Beta3
******************************************************************************

Compiler:
  + ARM (Linux) compiler
  + PowerPC Darwin (Mac OS X) support
  + reintroduce keyword support
  + added prefetch(const mem) support
  + MacPas compile mode
  + -gv to generate an executable that can be run under Valgrind >= 2.1
  * register allocator fixes and tweaks
  * better support for preprocessor $IF expressions
  * better overloaded operator support
  * Win32 DLL export table fixes
  * stabs (debuginfo) generation cleanups
  * enum names in RTTI are now in their original case
  * record alignment fixes
  * lots of bug fixes

RTL:
  + ARM Linux support
  + PowerPC Darwin support
  + Sysutils.RaiseLastOSError added
  + Sysutils.GetLastOSError added
  + Classes.TOwnedCollection added
  + Sysutils.FileIsReadOnly added
  + support of widestring and currency in the typinfo unit
  * Better support for Libc based RTL (FPC_USE_LIBC)
  * 64bit cleanup for future x86_64 port
  * ExecuteProcess fixes
  * Linux use getdents syscall instead of deprecated readdir
  * bug fixes

FCL:
  + SDF DB backend
  + TGA support in fpImage
  + support of widestring and currency type in stream related classes
  * Lot of fixes to fpImage classes

Misc:
  * better cross development support
  * Documentation updates
  * Testsuite updates to store testrun results in a database
  * Testsuite updates for cross platform testing, with remote rsh/ssh support