Free Pascal and Lazarus Wiki

This is a copy of the Free Pascal wiki at wiki.freepascal.org, kept at pascal.chat while the official wiki is offline. It is not the official wiki. About this copy

The goal of this wiki is to collect the knowledge needed to use Free Pascal, Lazarus and related projects productively. It is meant to be the first place to look for how to use the tools those projects provide.

The Free Pascal Compiler already has user documentation in several formats. Developer information, and subjects not yet properly documented, are kept here. Lazarus has gaps in its user documentation, so this wiki is where anyone can edit, improve and expand the Lazarus documentation.

New here? Start with the New Users portal, or practise editing in the Sand Box.

Free Pascal

• Website: news, the current version and the development status on the Free Pascal website, with its future plans and known problems.
• Downloads: official releases of the compiler, its source code and documentation from the download page. Snapshots of the compiler, the RTL and some packages are on the development page; the developers appreciate your testing them. See the installation instructions and the release notes.
• Community: new and experienced users alike are invited to the mailing lists (Free Pascal, announcements, developers, other, Pascal to JavaScript, MacPascal) and the Free Pascal forums; see how to use the forums.
• Tutorials: video tutorials, including a course from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, the Basic Pascal Tutorial, and object-oriented Pascal with Free Pascal and Lazarus.
• Books and magazines: Pascal and Lazarus Books and Magazines, free and commercial.

Lazarus

• Website: news and the status of the IDE on the Lazarus website, and a list of conferences and events.
• Roadmap: the Roadmap shows the state of each part of Lazarus.
• Downloads: releases of Lazarus, with the Free Pascal compiler and its source, from the Lazarus file area. See the installation instructions and the release notes for new features and breaking changes.
• Community: the Lazarus mailing list, the Lazarus Component and Code Repository lists, the IRC channel and the Lazarus forums; see how to use the forums.
• Tutorials: video tutorials, the object-oriented tutorial, and all other tutorials.
• Books and magazines: Pascal and Lazarus Books and Magazines, free and commercial.
• Related sites: Delphi and Kylix sites on the Page Of Code Sites. Add a good one that is missing.

Portals

Each portal gathers what the wiki has on one platform or topic. The Platform list has every platform Free Pascal and Lazarus support.

• Platforms: Android · Embedded · FreeBSD · iOS · Linux · macOS · WinCE · Windows
• Topics: New users · Databases · Games · Hardware and robotics · How-to demos · Science and technology · Web development

News, projects and bugs

• In the news: a summary of recent stories about Free Pascal and Lazarus is here.
• Projects: details and screenshots of many applications made with Free Pascal and Lazarus, and plenty of source code.
• Bugs: check the Lazarus bug tracker and the Free Pascal bug tracker to see whether a problem is already recorded. If it is not, report it so it can be fixed; even better, add a patch (Creating A Patch).

Editing this wiki

1. Press Join and confirm your email address. Saving needs a confirmed account.
2. To change a page, open it and press Edit.
3. To add a page, go to https://pascal.chat/wiki/Your_Page_Name and press Edit. A search that finds nothing also offers a link to write the page.
4. Press Preview to check it, write a few words under What changed, and press Save.

Pages are written in GitHub-style Markdown:

• Heading: ## Heading; bold: **bold**; code in a sentence: one backtick on each side.
• Code block: a line of three backticks before and after it; add pascal after the first three for Pascal highlighting.
• List: - item or 1. item. Outside link: [words](https://example.com). Link to a page here: [[Page Name]] or [[Page Name|words]].
• Redirect: make the first line #REDIRECT [[Other Page]]. Category: end the page with lines like Category: Lazarus. Translation: add the language to the name, such as Your_Page_Name/de.

An account gets 20 saves and previews an hour, and a page can be up to 200 KB. The editor cannot upload pictures yet. For problems with the wiki, ask in the chat or message the admin.

The people who wrote this wiki are on the Contributors page.

About this copy

The official Free Pascal wiki is offline. This copy keeps its pages available until it returns. It runs on a small personal server; if you can help host or maintain it, say so in the chat.

• Where the pages come from: most come from a full backup of the official wiki made on 26 May 2024, with its pictures. Edits made there after that date are being collected from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Each imported page ends with a note saying where it came from. Some pages did not convert cleanly: if you find one, fix it or report it in the chat.
• Page history: under each page from the official wiki, Edited on wiki.freepascal.org by ... lists who edited it there and when, back to 2005, and its History shows the same. The text of the earlier versions was not brought over: converting 126,000 of them from MediaWiki's markup to Markdown would have added many errors, while the current text of every page is here. Every earlier version is still in the full backup at the Internet Archive. Edits made there after 26 May 2024 were not recorded, so for those pages the text here is the last copy the Wayback Machine kept.
• Official wiki user names: everyone who edited articles there has an account here that holds their edits. To take yours over, join under another name and use Claim wiki name. An admin checks each claim by hand.
• Copyright: the official wiki's Licensing page says copyright in its articles stays with their authors. If you have concerns about material here, message the admin.
• Crawling: please do not crawl or bulk-download this site; the server is small. The full backup is at the Internet Archive, and anyone can run a mirror.