[Lazarus] Is Lazarus FPC compatible to RAD XE5?

[Juha Manninen]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 12:23 PM, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:
> When you talk about conversion tools, is there also some form of dproj
> project file conversion utility?

No but the .dproj file does not have much useful information for a
Lazarus project anyway.
I think it has the project search paths. They are needed in Lazarus
only if your project's unit files are in subdirectories. They must NOT
be used for library code. Lazarus package system takes care of that.

A related issue are the global search paths in Delphi. They are
commonly used for components and libraries which are used by many
projects. This breaks the idea of modular design and pollutes the
namespace, and prevents compiling projects in different machines
without first configuring Delphi's global path.
I think even Borland wanted to change that but they didn't for
backwards compatibility.
Lazarus does not have global search path at all. Any library code
should be in a Lazarus package. A project or another package can then
depend on that package. The package "injects" its own source paths to
the master project/package. No ugly path configuration is needed,
never!
Lazarus IDE remembers any package that is has once opened. The package
is then used when needed without extra configuration.

> So I had to start a new VCL project when I did the Unicode conversion
> (UTF8 is what I used) and then add all the sources to that project and
> set the various properties like search paths and such manually...

Do you use UTF-8 with XE Delphi? Why? It triggers conversion between
UTF-8 and UTF-16 at every assignment.

I can recommend the new UTF-8 support in Lazarus for you because you
only start converting now:
  http://wiki.freepascal.org/Better_Unicode_Support_in_Lazarus
It is almost compatible with Delphi even though the encoding is different.
It requires now development version of FPC but they will release
3.0RC1 soon. Thus you can ignore Unicode issues now and return to them
when your conversion works otherwise.

So, what the does the automatic conversion (in Tools menu) say?

Juha