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

[Bo Berglund]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 10:14:16 +0100, Birger Jansen <birger at cnoc.nl>
wrote:

>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

Really great! I have a similar problem in conversion to FPC/Lazarus of
a visualization package of physical data. But this package uses number
crunching DLL:s created using an Intel Fortran compiler...

Nevertheless I would like to know your solutions to the programmatic
conversion problems because our package also uses MDI forms and the
graphics is OpenGL via GLScene.
Ideally I would like to be able to move it to 64 bit to enhance the
computational speed and model sizes.
And of course compile also for Linux...
Did you test your conversion also on Linux?

Finally a little hint:
When you make screenshots to post it is usually much better to save
them as PNG files rather than JPG. JPG is lossy and the first things
that go are straight lines and text, which becomes blurry. PNG is
non-loss and also compresses the data much better (for a typical
screenshot) so the resulting file is smaller too...


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden