DeleD Community Edition :: View topic - Converting DeleD to lazarus/freepascal?

DeleD Community Edition
Forums

FAQ

Memberlist

Usergroups

Profile

Converting DeleD to lazarus/freepascal?

This forum is locked: you cannot post, reply to, or edit topics.

This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies.

DeleD Community Edition Forum Index -> DeleD Development

View previous topic :: View next topic

Author

Message

paul_nicholls
DeleD PRO user

Joined: 05 Dec 2007
Posts: 356
Location: Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 10:15 pm Post subject: Converting DeleD to lazarus/freepascal?

Hi all,
a person on the lazarus mailing list was talking about improvements (via a patch) he has made to the delphi to lazarus convertion process.

I told him about the DeleD project going open source and that it would be great if it could be converted to lazarus/freepascal to be made cross-platform compatible.

This is his reply:

Juha Manninen wrote:

Hi.

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

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 Smile

> 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 Smile

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 Smile

> 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

--
_______________________________________________
Lazarus mailing list
Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org
http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus

Hopefully this gives us some 'food for thought' if WE try to convert it to lazarus/freepascal Smile

cheers,
Paul
_________________
Long live DeleD!

Hi ho...hi ho...it's off 3d modeling I go...

chronozphere
DeleD PRO user

Joined: 20 Jun 2006
Posts: 1010
Location: Netherlands

Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 8:17 am Post subject:

lol.. I thought this was months of work. It may actually be feasible. I'd like to know what Jeroen en PJ think!

Paul-Jan
Site Admin

Joined: 08 Aug 2004
Posts: 3066
Location: Lage Zwaluwe

Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 9:49 am Post subject:

Very interesting! The key remark however is

Quote:

Please remember that you still must make (lots of) manual changes to make your code compile and work

Then he goes on about windows-specifics, but that's not really relevant imho (remember that (1) compatibility with freepascal and (2)crossplatform are TWO SEPERATE paths, even though the second requires the first).

The point is how much work is "a lot", preferrable keeping the project as a whole delphi-compatible as well (should be doable). From my initial estimations at the time this was quite a lot of work, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. I'd still advice anyone willing to try to first invest serious time into getting to know the source by fixing bugs or adding minor features, then diving into the deep and doing the port.

oliebol
Member

Joined: 30 Dec 2009
Posts: 8
Location: Eindhoven

Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 10:26 pm Post subject:

Paul-Jan wrote:

Very interesting! The key remark however is

The point is how much work is "a lot", preferrable keeping the project as a whole delphi-compatible as well (should be doable).

Depends on which version you choose. (same as supported by Codegear? D2007+?), but IMHO at least D7+, anything else is too much a burden. (both in the age and missing features, as in the number of versions getting out of hand)

Anyway, a good first step would be to move away from a IFDEF system based directly on Delphi versions, and move to something more capability based.

On a blue monday, I wrote about this a bit:

http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/porting.pdf (mainly chapter 2
_________________
Marco V

Display posts from previous:

	DeleD Community Edition Forum Index -> DeleD Development	All times are GMT
Page 1 of 1

You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum