FPC 2.4.0 released

We have placed a new major release of the Free Pascal Compiler,
version 2.4.0 on our ftp-servers.

Changes that may break backwards compatibility are documented at:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.4.0

Downloads are available at:

the main FTP server at

ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/2.4.0/

and

ftp://freepascal.stack.nl/pub/fpc/dist/2.4.0/

Enjoy!

The Free Pascal Compiler Team

                        Free Pascal Compiler

                            Version 2.4.0

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                          What's New in 2.4.0

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Free Pascal 2.4.0 contains many fixes and new features. While we did not
manage to incorporate all planned additions, we believe this release offers a
nice collection of new functionality and bug fixes.

Please also see http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.4.0 for a list
of changes which may affect the behaviour of previously working code, and
how to cope with these changes.

Some highlights are:

Platforms:
* New platform: Mac OS X/PowerPC64
* New platform: Mac OS X/x86_64
* New platform: Mac OS X/ARM (iPhone)
* New platform: Haiku/i386

Compiler:
* Support for Delphi-style resource handling
* Whole-program optimization infrastructure, which initially supports
program devirtualization and unused virtual method removal
* Much faster compilation of units containing many type-sections
* The ability to suppress individual hints/warnings/notes
* Several improvements to the DWARF debug information generation
* Fixes to the generics support
* Fixes to the interface delegation (implements) support
* Improved cpu register allocation
* Improved ARM/EABI support

RTL:
* Linearly scaling multi-threaded memory manager
* Support for (advisory) file locking on Unix-based platforms
when using the SysUtils file creation/opening routines
* Support for ANSI ISO Extended Pascal ReadStr/WriteStr
* A UnicodeString type that, while not yet equivalent to Delphi 2009's
UnicodeString type, offers reference counted UnicodeString support on
the Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Beos/Haiku platforms.

Packages:
* Many improvements to the XML units
* Many improvements to the database units
* Updated the common Mac OS X Pascal interfaces to r241, including
header a translation of the CFNetwork framework
* The zipper unit now works correctly on big endian platforms

See http://bugs.freepascal.org/changelog_page.php for the list of reported
bugs which have been fixed in this release.