After 9 months of active development and bug fixes, the Free Pascal core team is proud to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the expected 2.2.2 compiler.

Users who want to test this release candidate are encouraged to report bugs and regressions they encounter as soon as possible in order to get them in next release candidate planned for next month and the final release possibly before end of August, 2008.

The release candidate packages are available for download in ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/fpc/beta/2.2.2rc1

The new release contains many bug-fixes and some new features. The main purpose of this release is to fix problems reported with FPC 2.2.0, and to remove all potentially tainted code from our source code base.

Please also see http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.2.2 for a list of changes which may affect the behaviour of previously working code, and
how to cope with these changes.

Some highlights are:

All:
* All code potentially infringing on CodeGear copyrighted code has been
reimplemented using a cleanroom approach.

Platforms:
* Incompatibilities with Mac OS X 10.5's new default linker have been resolved.

Compiler:
* PIC support for Mac OS X (on by default, disable with -Cg-)
* several bugs in the experimental generics support have been fixed, but this feature is still in beta
* initialisation and finalisation of shared libraries has been fixed for all Darwin platforms, and for Linux/i386
* support for {$packset x} directive to enable set packing (use {$packset 1} for Delphi-compatible sets, but note that the format is different on little and big endian platforms)

RTL:
* thread resource leaking under unix has been fixed
* the widestring manager for unix has been completed
* several floating point to string conversion errors have been fixed
* significantly improved variant support
* implementation of RTL exception handler for OS/2 allowing proper translation of some runtime errors
* various fixes for GO32v2 improving useability of this target
* OS/2 RTL enhanced to allow seamless working with large files (64-bit file system API calls) where available (WSeB/MCP/eCS/Warp 4 with FP15)

Packages:
* the Windows API interface units have been significantly updated
* Apple universal interfaces updated to r234 of the common FPC/GPC/MW interfaces

Documentation
* Documentation was updated completely to conform to the actual state of the compiler and RTL.

See http://bugs.freepascal.org/changelog_page.php for the list of reported bugs which have been fixed in this release.

FPC Core Team,

Mazen,

People who want to test with Lazarus can download several Lazarus snapshot with fpc 2.2.2rc1 from http://www.hu.freepascal.org/lazarus/

Vincent

Hi,

I did download the new version with fpc 2.2.2 for Mac OS X i386, but what happened to the unit FPCMacOSAll? I can't find the file anywhere :-/

Thanks,
Normann

[snip]

Bent Normann Olsen wrote

I did download the new version with fpc 2.2.2 for Mac OS X i386, but what happened to the unit FPCMacOSAll? I can't find the file anywhere :-/

It's called MacOSAll now. Please read http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.2.2 for why, and also for other documented changes.

Jonas

Thanks, I'll take a look at it ;-)

Hi all,

I did try to install FPC-2.2.2rc1, but eventually had to revert to previous installation due to different kinds of errors when compiling.

The errors ranged from "range check" errors to syntax errors, and all kinds of "cannot find unit file..." etc.

These might also be caused by my lack of experience with setting up Lazarus and FPC on Mac OS X environment.

I will go for a new installation at a later point.

Best regards,
Normann

Please provide example programs which failed. They may point to regressions in the compiler (which is the whole point of having a release candidate).

and all kinds of "cannot find unit file..." etc.

Which units? Your own or FPC-provided ones?

Jonas

Probably FPC ones. Pathes in the RPM installer are broken due to 2.2.2rc1 version string.

This was about the Mac OS X 2.2.2rc1 snapshot on the Lazarus download page. Also, if the compiler gives range check and syntax errors, that means that it does find at least the system unit, otherwise it would never get to parsing the source code.

Jonas

I reinstalled Lazarus with FPC 2.2.0, because it got too complicated to deal with several compiler errors. It couldn't find components like TWinControl and TMenu, though it had not trouble finding them through source using [Ctrl+Left button] in IDE.

When it began to tell me, that codes from FPC units results in range check error, I gave up.

Sorry, I should have written all my findings, but it got frustrating and went back to FPC 2.2.0.

Regards,
Normann