fpc:start

Freepascal is an excellent open source object pascal compiler available for many platforms. For more information, please see the official Freepascal website.

I use it in many of my projects, especially embedded projects on Raspberry Pi single board computers. However it is not well maintained on that platform.

Often the official builds of Freepascal for Raspbian are out of date - sometimes severely so. Raspbian Jessie was stuck at version 2.6. Raspbian Stretch now has 3.0.0 available, but how regularly will it be updated to track the official Freepascal releases? I suspect not very often based on the past.

I have figured out how to build my own installers/distributions of Freepascal for the Raspberry Pi, and will aim to track official FPC releases.

My releases do not have working debugging / gdb support, as I cannot figure out how to satisfy that part of the build process. It requires the correct version of libgdb assembly files which I cannot locate. For most people this will not matter - the compiler and libraries work perfectly. The only broken/missing functionality is the debugging built into the IDE which you don't really need.

The current release is v3.0.4 [2017/12/10]

Freepascal for Raspberry Pi releases page - click here

Transfer the file to your Raspberry Pi, or download it using wget. Then login, unpack and run install.sh as root using sudo. Here is an example session. Please make sure you grab the latest version, don't blindly copy the commands.

~ $ mkdir install
~ $ cd install/
~/install $ wget https://media.zipplet.co.uk/fpc-rpi/fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux.tar
<snip>
~/install $ tar -xvf fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux.tar
fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux/
fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux/binary.arm-linux.tar
fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux/install.sh
fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux/doc-pdf.tar.gz
fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux/demo.tar.gz
~/install $ cd fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux/
~/install/fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux $ sudo ./install.sh

The screen then clears, and you'll see the installation screen. It is recommended you choose /usr/local for the installation path. Here is my session. Tar might warn about lone zero blocks, but the installer works anyway. If you are a maintainer of freepascal and know what I'm doing wrong, please let me know so that I can remove this warning from my installers. Thank you!

This shell script will attempt to install the Free Pascal Compiler
version 3.0.2 with the items you select

Install prefix (/usr or /usr/local)  [/usr] : /usr/local
Installing compiler and RTL for arm-linux...
Installing rtl packages...
Installing rtl-console
Installing rtl-extra
Installing rtl-objpas
Installing rtl-unicode
Installing fcl...
Installing fcl-async
Installing fcl-base
Installing fcl-db
Installing fcl-extra
Installing fcl-fpcunit
Installing fcl-image
Installing fcl-js
Installing fcl-json
Installing fcl-net
Installing fcl-passrc
Installing fcl-pdf
Installing fcl-process
Installing fcl-registry
Installing fcl-res
Installing fcl-sdo
Installing fcl-sound
Installing fcl-stl
Installing fcl-web
Installing fcl-xml
Installing packages...
Installing a52
Installing aspell
Installing bfd
Installing bzip2
Installing cairo
Installing cdrom
Installing chm
Installing dblib
Installing dbus
Installing dts
Installing fastcgi
Installing fftw
Installing fpgtk
Installing fpindexer
Installing fpmkunit
Installing fppkg
Installing fv
Installing gdbint
Installing gdbm
Installing ggi
Installing gmp
Installing gnome1
Installing googleapi
Installing gtk1
Installing gtk2
Installing hash
Installing hermes
Installing httpd22
Installing httpd24
Installing ibase
Installing iconvenc
Installing imagemagick
Installing imlib
Installing jni
Installing ldap
Installing libcurl
Installing libgd
Installing libmicrohttpd
Installing libpng
Installing libsee
Installing libtar
Installing libvlc
Installing libxml2
Installing lua
Installing mad
Installing modplug
Installing mysql
Installing ncurses
Installing newt
Installing numlib
Installing odbc
Installing oggvorbis
Installing openal
Installing opengl
Installing opengles
Installing openssl
Installing oracle
Installing pasjpeg
Installing paszlib
Installing pcap
Installing postgres
Installing proj4
Installing ptc
Installing pthreads
Installing pxlib
Installing regexpr
Installing rsvg
Installing sdl
Installing sqlite
Installing svgalib
Installing symbolic
Installing syslog
Installing tcl
Installing unzip
Installing users
Installing utmp
Installing uuid
Installing x11
Installing xforms
Installing zlib
Installing zorba
Installing utilities...
Installing utils
Installing fpcm
Installing fpcmkcfg
Installing fpcres
Installing fpdoc
Installing fppkg
Installing fprcp
Installing h2pas
Installing instantfpc
Installing lexyacc
Installing pas2fpm
Installing pas2jni
Installing pas2ut
Installing unicode
Install Textmode IDE (Y/n) ? y
tar: A lone zero block at 8729
Done.

Install documentation (Y/n) ? y
Installing documentation in /usr/local/share/doc/fpc-3.0.2 ...
Done.

Install demos (Y/n) ? y
Install demos in [/usr/local/share/doc/fpc-3.0.2/examples] :
Installing demos in /usr/local/share/doc/fpc-3.0.2/examples ...
Done.

Running on linux
Write permission in /etc.
Writing sample configuration file to /etc/fpc.cfg
Saved old "fpc.cfg" to "fpc.bak"
Writing sample configuration file to /usr/local/lib/fpc/3.0.2/ide/text/fp.cfg
Saved old "fp.cfg" to "fp.bak"
Writing sample configuration file to /usr/local/lib/fpc/3.0.2/ide/text/fp.ini
Saved old "fp.ini" to "fp.bak"
Writing sample configuration file to /etc/fppkg.cfg
Saved old "fppkg.cfg" to "fppkg.bak"
Writing sample configuration file to /etc/fppkg/default
Saved old "default" to "default.bak"

End of installation.

Refer to the documentation for more information.

First, just run fpc and make sure you get sensible output like this with the version you downloaded:

~/install/fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux $ fpc
Free Pascal Compiler version 3.0.2 [2017/11/19] for arm
Copyright (c) 1993-2017 by Florian Klaempfl and others
/usr/local/bin/fpc [options] <inputfile> [options]
 Only options valid for the default or selected platform are listed.
 Put + after a boolean switch option to enable it, - to disable it.
  @<x>   Read compiler options from <x> in addition to the default fpc.cfg
  -a     The compiler does not delete the generated assembler file
      -al        List sourcecode lines in assembler file
      -an        List node info in assembler file (-dEXTDEBUG compiler)
      -ao        Add an extra option to external assembler call (ignored for internal)
      -ap        Use pipes instead of creating temporary assembler files
      -ar        List register allocation/release info in assembler file
      -at        List temp allocation/release info in assembler file
  -A<x>  Output format:
      -Adefault  Use default assembler
      -Aas       Assemble using GNU AS
  -b     Generate browser info
      -bl        Generate local symbol info
  -B     Build all modules
  -C<x>  Code generation options:
      -C3        Turn on ieee error checking for constants
      -Ca<x>     Select ABI; see fpc -i or fpc -ia for possible values
*** press enter ***

If you do, create a file called helloworld.dpr using nano, vim or your favourite editor containing:

program helloworld;

begin
  writeln('Hello, world');
end.

Now compile it by typing fpc helloworld.dpr and you should see something like this:

~/install/fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux $ fpc helloworld.dpr
Free Pascal Compiler version 3.0.2 [2017/11/19] for arm
Copyright (c) 1993-2017 by Florian Klaempfl and others
Target OS: Linux for ARMHF
Compiling helloworld.dpr
Assembling helloworld
Linking helloworld
/usr/bin/ld: warning: link.res contains output sections; did you forget -T?
5 lines compiled, 1.4 sec

Great. Execute it.

~/install/fpc-3.0.2.arm-linux $ ./helloworld
Hello, world

Now you have a recent version of freepascal on your Raspberry Pi. Enjoy it :)

I'm glad you asked. Information on this is hard to find, so I have written a build guide to do it yourself for the Raspberry Pi. I hope you find it useful! I might add build guides for other platforms later.

If this helped you out, I'm happy it did. That's enough satisfaction for me. However if you'd like to donate towards my projects, website hosting fees and continuing this work, please see my donations page for instructions. Thank you.

  • fpc/start.txt
  • Last modified: 2017/12/10 06:49 UTC
  • by Zipplet