Revision 1 of 1, by Kai Burghardt on 6-28-2014. The page as it is now.
FPC Advantages
Advantages of the Free Pascal compiler
This page should clarify the strong points of the Free Pascal compiler (FPC), and present some of the benefits of using it.
- No Makefiles – Unlike most programming languages, FPC does not need Makefiles. You can save a huge amount of time, the compiler just figures out by itself which files need to be recompiled.
- Very fast compilation – Pascal compilers are Fast with a big F and FPC is no exception. Just hit the compile key and it's done, even for large programs.
- Each unit has its own identifiers – In FPC you never need to worry about polluting the namespace, like in C where an identifier needs to be globally unique across the entire program. No, FPC helds for each unit a very own namespace and that's very relaxed.
- Integrated development environment – FPC comes with an IDE which works on several platforms. You can write, compile and debug your programs within the IDE. You will save huge amounts of time using the IDE, the best programming friend you have.
- Smartlinking – FPC does smart linking leaving out any variable or code that you do not use. That makes small programs small with a big S, while they are still statically linked, avoiding DLL hell!
- Distribution independence (Linux) – As a result of this, software compiled by the Linux version of FPC runs on any Linux distribution, making it much, much, easier to make your software support multiple Linux distributions.
- Available for a lot of platforms on several architectures – Free Pascal is available for more platforms than most other Pascal compilers and allows easy cross-compiling: just change the target in the IDE and compile! And there is work going on for even more platforms and processors.
See also
From the Free Pascal wiki, page "FPC Advantages", as it stood on 2014-06-28 after a change by Kai Burghardt, out of the wiki's dump of 2024-05-26. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.