> What the best thing about Pascal (and its successor Delphi) was the blazing fast compilation time and I am not sure that freePascal has that.

I'm not sure how FreePascal compares to Delphi in compilation speed, but I expect both are blazing fast. The compilation speed is a result of the language design of Pascal, and the fact that compilation can use a "single pass compiler". Go is another language that has this feature. Compilation times are so fast that development can feel similar to using an interpreted language.