The free pascal compiler is an object pascal compiler supporting both delphi and turbo pascal 7.0 dialects as well as mac pascal dialects. it provides a completely portable runtime library (rtl) available on many platforms and compatible with turbo pascal, but also a platform independent class based free component library (fcl) adding many delphi extensions and interfacing many popular open source libraries.

some extensions are added to the language, like function overloading. shared libraries can be linked and created. delphi language extensions like classes, exceptions, ansi strings and open arrays are also supported.

this package contains dependency on all fpc packages provided on your architecture. experienced users may want to install only packages they need, and can skip installing this metapackage.