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

Hi,

May I assume MultiThreading issues are gone.

And PIC (Position Independant Code) generation is working too ? It was the biggest hurdle to generate dynamic libraries on Linux (*.so file), if I remember correctly.

Best Regards,
^IoDream^

**************************************************************************** **

Whats New in 1.9.4 aka 2.0.0-Beta3

**************************************************************************** **

IoDream wrote

Hi, May I assume MultiThreading issues are gone.

Multithreading is improved. However, "advanced" multithreading technologies like recursice mutexes aren't available in a platform independend way yet.

And PIC (Position Independant Code) generation is working too ? It was the biggest hurdle to generate dynamic libraries on Linux (*.so file), if I remember correctly.

PIC is one hurdle but not the biggest. Packages support is planned for the next beta.

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

> And PIC (Position Independant Code) generation is working too ? No. See the roadmap: scheduled for 1.9.6

Excuse me ignorance. I don't beleive I know what PIC is... What is PIC ?

cheers
James

IoDream wrote

Hi, May I assume MultiThreading issues are gone.

Multithreading is implemented.

And PIC (Position Independant Code) generation is working too ?

No. See the roadmap: scheduled for 1.9.6

It was the biggest hurdle to generate dynamic libraries on Linux (*.so file), if I remember correctly.

A .so can already be generated without PIC.

Michael.

04-06-02 15.39, skrev James Mills följande:

In OS's like unix (dont know about windows/dos) the machine code has absolute adresses. This works because there is a virtual address space for each process. But if a shared library is used, it cannot use absolute addressing, since othersise it might collide with another shared library. Hence it has to be independant of where in memory it is loaded. And data has to be accessed relative the program counter. Code with this property is PIC.

Olle