fpc 2.4.0 released!

Menuda manera de empezar el año :)

Extracto de rigor del anuncio oficial de Marco van de Voort:

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

Se puede consultar los cambios para el usuario en el wiki oficial. Hacedlo con paciencia ;)

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