[Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi -> FreePascal: success!

[Birger Jansen]

Hi all,

Last month I converted a 500.000 lines Delphi project to FreePascal, and I wanted to thank those who replied to my questions over the mailing list and the whole FPC / Lazarus team for delivering a great product. Also all contributors to wiki pages, newsgroups and forums: thanks! Even the smallest pages or postings contained useful information and are a valuable source of information.

The converted application is an output viewer for calculations based on the finite element method. It is intended for 2-Dimensional and 3-Dimensional geotechnical analysis of deformation and stability of soil structures, as well as groundwater and heat flow, in geo-engineering applications such as excavation, foundations, embankments and tunnels. (so this is a result viewer, the actual calculations are performed with another application).

The conversion was a pilot with the main reason for trying FPC the need for 64 bit. During conversion I encountered lots of small issues (Unicode, OpenGL, images with scanline manipulation, generics, anonymous methods, class constants and functions, MDI forms, treeview with custom drawing, Steema TChart, custom controls and more). For most of the encountered issues I created a list with their solution, I'll try to clean it up and see if I can post it somewhere because it might also be helpful for others.

Attached you will find some screenshots of the result, these give you an idea of what the program does.

With kind regards,
  Birger Jansen
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