I soon have to commit my choice of FreePascal version to have installed on the laptops of our new first-year students coming this fall.

Furthermore, the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) this year is taking place in September, and software versions are in the process of being decided.

For the IOI, it is not so important to have Delphi compatibility, but for my education it is.

For the IOI, it looks like we'll stick to 1.0.10 (unless a stable release will appear "soon").

For my education, I would prefer a 1.9. (or 2.0 ??) version. What are the current development/release plans? Which 1.9 version is sufficiently stable?

Tom

I soon have to commit my choice of FreePascal version to have installed on the laptops of our new first-year students coming this fall.

Furthermore, the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) this year is taking place in September, and software versions are in the process of being decided.

For the IOI, it is not so important to have Delphi compatibility, but for my education it is.

For the IOI, it looks like we'll stick to 1.0.10 (unless a stable release will appear "soon").

For my teaching, I would prefer a 1.9. (or 2.0 ??) version. What are the current development/release plans? Which 1.9 version is sufficiently stable?

Tom

(sorry for the delay, we were having roadmap discussions in FPC core)

I soon have to commit my choice of FreePascal version to have

installed on the laptops of our new first-year students coming this fall.

Furthermore, the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) this

year

is taking place in September, and software versions are in the

process

of being decided. For the IOI, it is not so important to have Delphi compatibility, but for my education it is.

Delphi compat is at all time high in 1.9.x. So I definitely would suggest taking the newest 1.9.x snapshot, and postpone it as long as possible. Usually, the faculty dependant part of the images is made quite late in the summer holidays, so maybe even 1.9.6 can be doable.

However maybe it would be better to ship 1.9.4 that has been out a while than a 1.9.6 that is brand new.

For the IOI, it looks like we'll stick to 1.0.10 (unless a stable release will appear "soon").

1.9.x is undoubtedly more stable than 1.0.10. The stability criteria for 2.0 are simply higher, which is why 1.9.x are still branded beta's.

1.0.10 is now already off lifesupport, and quite a lot of the users are already using 1.9.x beta releases. In august this percentage will be even higher.

What to do with IOI depends on how usable 1.0.10 is for that kind of purposes. (if it was ok the other years, then stick to it). However at some point there must be a transition to 1.9.x/2.0 too for IOI, so even if you choose 1.0.10 because it is a known factor, get some 1.9.x testing process running for IOI too.

For my teaching, I would prefer a 1.9. (or 2.0 ??) version. What are the current development/release plans? Which 1.9 version is sufficiently stable?

1.9.4 very soon now (as in the coming days), and other 1.9.x versions every 2 months (but that usually slips a few weeks/months).

2.0 is not expected before september, but throughout the beta cycle, the stability improves quickly, so the last beta's just before 2.0 are expected to be more about release engineering, IDE and improving the new support on the new architectures than about the normal release stuff.

P.s. some roadmap schedules are at
http://www.freepascal.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Road_to_2.0

Marco van de Voort ( or )

Speaking of olympiads (and IOI), how about including e.g. DeCAL in the standard FPC distribution (e.g. in packages or something like that), because C++ programmers have STL and it could sometimes be an advantage to them. I mean very few people are able to implement e.g. a Red-Black tree during the competition. And for the ACM ICPC it's somewhat worse since there it's even more vital to code your programs quickly, so usually C++ with STL ends up being the language of choice. ...hope there aren't any licensing issues...