[lazarus] I am new here ...

[Michael.VanCanneyt at Wisa.be]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Andrew Johnson wrote:

> FYI I have a fairly recent IBObjects(7 months) and I have many times
> worked on it toward lazarus compatibility internally here.
> 
> Apart from the GUI which I never got too much of apart from the dialogs
> etc needed just for core components, the code base is incredibly FPC
> unfriendly(thousands upon thousands of fpc strictness rules broken, and
> completely unreliable in $mode DELPHI, meaning a complete switch to
> objfpc needed and all that it implies), and is very much immersed in
> win32 API which it uses directly for such things as timers and
> multithreading for instance to handle shared db between dll's and
> exe's(obviously only possible to replace using >=1.9.x without much
> pthread hackery).
> 
> I have on one occasion gotten it too "compile" though it never properly
> worked and crashed much, however the amount of work to get it to that
> point was no easy task and it may simply be that Jason Wharton has no
> desire or time to handle this, since he also must ensure backward
> compatibility with all of Delphi versions, whereas I was only interested
> in lazarus and FPC and could easily make changes accordingly. And though
> I would still love to see an official version with lazarus and fpc in
> addition to Delphi >= 3/4 support, I wouldn't blame him if he didn't
> make it a priority or waited a good long while before he looked into it.
> 
> Anyway, just to put things in perspective. :)

Thanks for this contribution. It is for all the reasons mentioned here that
I advised to contact Jason Wharton: IBObjects is a fairly involved piece of
code. My personal opinion would be that it would suffice to get the
non-visual DB part to work, with the additional TDataset descendents.
I had contacts with Jason about this some years ago, but at the time, FPC
simply wasn't up to it...

Unfortunately, the same story is true for ZEOS lib...

I recently wrote an article about porting existing components to Lazarus,
and the main conclusion for me is: 'It can be done, but it is not easy' :/

Michael.