[Lazarus] Delphi converter improvements

[Juha Manninen]

Hi.

>   I know a number of people who would be interested in your delphi 
> converter, including myself :)

Good to know!
(Although it is not really MY converter, but I am willing to improve it.)

> An easy to use 3d modeling package has now gone open source:
> www.delgine.com
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/deled/

> The project has currently been written using Delphi, but some of us would 
> love to be able to convert it over completely to Lazarus/freepascal so it is 
> multi-platform :)

> This won't be easy as there is a LOT of delphi GUI forms and frames there, 
> but it would be great if this could be done.

Wow, such a good test case!
I became curious and downloaded it and converted to Lazarus. Conversion worked 
better than expected. All the forms I opened looked good.

My patches for converter make it less verbose, not asking so many trivial 
questions. Now I see it still asks too many questions, about non existing 
units and properties. It should be made configurable to be fully silent and 
automatic.


> perhaps your delphi converter improvments could help us in this area :)

Yes, the amount of questions is more reasonable now but there are still many 
things to improve.

Please remember that you still must make (lots of) manual changes to make your 
code compile and work. The converter doesn't try to fix windows dependent code 
or such things. In your code I see at least 2 things that need porting: OpenGL 
and jpeg. There is support for both in FPC/Lazarus (GL and pasjpeg) but I have 
no idea how difficult the porting is. At least the windows handles will not 
work.


> Keep up the great work :)

> Perhaps I should try using lazarus from SVN instead of binaries and try your 
> patch?

I hope I can develop the code for trunk. That would allow interaction with 
people who use it. Besides the isolated patches can end up being ignored 
forever, that's how I feel now...

<OT>
Your code has very many units. How did you solve the circular reference 
problem? I didn't make any deep analysis of your code but it looks clean. I 
could expect there are lots of cross references in such 3D design prog.
Or, maybe there are some units full of type casting but I missed them.
</OT>


Regards,
Juha Manninen