[fpc-pascal] Free Pascal 2.4.0 released

[Mark Emerson]

Dear FPC Team,

THANK YOU FOR YOUR EXTRAORDINARY WORK AND DEDICATION!!!

Dunno what we would do without you!!!

Happy New Year to you all, and to all your dear ones, and to all FPC users 
world-wide.

May this be the year  when SIGNIFICANTLY more people come to realize the FPC 
is the BEST general-purpose programming language.  

This year begins the FIFTH decade for Pascal (developed by Wirth in 1970), and 
Niklaus Wirth will turn 76 this year.  May this be the decade when Pascal, 
through FPC, becomes the language OF CHOICE for general-purpose programming 
by expert programmers worldwide.

Mark Emerson

On Friday 01 January 2010 02:47:42 am Marco van de Voort wrote:
> Happy New Year!
>
> As a special present, We have placed a new major release of the Free Pascal
> Compiler, version 2.4.0 on our ftp-servers.
>
> Changes that may break backwards compatibility are documented at:
> http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.4.0
>
> Downloads are available at:
>
> the main FTP server at
>
> ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/beta/2.4.0/
>
> and
>
> ftp://freepascal.stack.nl/pub/fpc/beta/2.4.0/
>
> Enjoy!
>
> The Free Pascal Compiler Team
>
>
>                             Free Pascal Compiler
>
>                                 Version 2.4.0
>
> ***************************************************************************
>*** What's New in 2.4.0
> ***************************************************************************
>***
>
> Free Pascal 2.4.0 contains many fixes and new features. While we did not
> manage to incorporate all planned additions, we believe this release offers
> a nice collection of new functionality and bug fixes.
>
>
> Please also see http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.4.0 for a list
> of changes which may affect the behaviour of previously working code, and
> how to cope with these changes.
>
> Some highlights are:
>
> Platforms:
>   * New platform: Mac OS X/PowerPC64
>   * New platform: Mac OS X/x86_64
>   * New platform: Mac OS X/ARM (iPhone)
>   * New platform: Haiku/i386
>
> Compiler:
>   * Support for Delphi-style resource handling
>   * Whole-program optimization infrastructure, which initially supports
>     program devirtualization and unused virtual method removal
>   * Much faster compilation of units containing many type-sections
>   * The ability to suppress individual hints/warnings/notes
>   * Several improvements to the DWARF debug information generation
>   * Fixes to the generics support
>   * Fixes to the interface delegation (implements) support
>   * Improved cpu register allocation
>   * Improved ARM/EABI support
>
> RTL:
>   * Linearly scaling multi-threaded memory manager
>   * Support for (advisory) file locking on Unix-based platforms
>     when using the SysUtils file creation/opening routines
>   * Support for ANSI ISO Extended Pascal ReadStr/WriteStr
>   * A UnicodeString type that, while not yet equivalent to Delphi 2009's
>     UnicodeString type, offers reference counted UnicodeString support on
>     the Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Beos/Haiku platforms.
>
> Packages:
>   * Many improvements to the XML units
>   * Many improvements to the database units
>   * Updated the common Mac OS X Pascal interfaces to r241, including
>     header a translation of the CFNetwork framework
>   * The zipper unit now works correctly on big endian platforms
>
> See http://bugs.freepascal.org/changelog_page.php for the list of reported
> bugs which have been fixed in this release.
>