The 2.4.x Release Series
The 2.4.x release series had a less clear set of goals than earlier releases. The unit system rewrite was postponed again, and the branch that became 2.4 was created to keep risky commits from 2.2 to stabilize it. Mostly these risky commits were more involved improvements to the new platforms, Mac PowerPC 64, Mac x86-64, iPhone, and many fixes to the ARM and x86-64 architectures in general, as well as DWARF.
Other compiler improvements included whole program optimization (WPO) and devirtualization and ARM EABI support.
Later, during the 2.2 cycle, a more Delphi-like resource support (based on special sections in the binary instead of Pascal constants) was added; this feature, direly needed by Lazarus, became the main highlight of the branch.
Other more minor points were a memory manager that improved heap manager performance in threaded environments, small improvements in Delphi compatibility such as OleVariant, and improvements in interface delegation.
Free Pascal 2.4.0 was released on January 1, 2010, followed by bug fix release 2.4.2 on November 13, 2010, containing support for for..in loops, and sealed and abstract classes, and other changes.
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