[Lazarus] Delphi converter improvements

[Paul Nicholls]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Juha Manninen" <juha.manninen at phnet.fi>
To: "Lazarus mailing list" <lazarus at lists.lazarus.freepascal.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 9:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Delphi converter improvements


> 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.

Excellent! thanks for trying :)

Please, continue to use this as a test case if you wish :)

>> 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.

good to know

> 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.

Yup...you are right about plenty of manual changes :)

I knew about windows dependent code ;)

The OpenGL should be only a minor issue to fix.

Thanks for the info about the windows handles!

>
>> 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>

I haven't looked closely at the code in regards to the circular reference
issues either LOL

I guess units have been put in the implementation section to get around this
issue as like you, I haven't noticed much type casting yet.

And as you might have guessed, it isn't MY code either LOL
I HAVE contributed to it, but that is all ;)

>
> Regards,
> Juha Manninen
>
> --
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> Lazarus at lists.lazarus.freepascal.org
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>

Is there anyway I could try out your Lazarus delphi converter improvements?

What is the procedure for this?

Thanks for your work so far Juha!!

cheers,
Paul