Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
On 01/05/2011 10:18 PM, waldo kitty wrote: On 1/5/2011 12:33, Micha Nelissen wrote: Bo Berglund wrote: 2) The fortran code failed to translate when it turned out that Fortran could change the type of a matrix multiplication depending on the dimensions of the two input matrices. You couldn't translate the code or the function declarations? Calling the fortran code from freepascal might be possible, then you don't have to translate the code itself, just call it. this was discussed but IIRC it seemed that determining the proper calling procedures came up... if the library wasn't callable in pascal or C format or some such... one would need to be able to compile those libraries in a FPC/Lazarus compatible format for the normal callouts (is that the proper term) to work... since this was hard to do (ie: no compiler with this capability??) it was looked into that those routines could be recoded in pascal format... this too has not been able to be done because there's no available FORTRAN - PASCAL coder who can make the conversion... Many moons ago, when I was writing projects in both FORTRAN and Pascal on a DEC PDP-11, the limitations of the hardware were such that we used to have to compile to assembler and then patch breakpoints into the code in order to debug it. Things have almost certainly changed since those days, but I do remember that while the Pascal compiler we used pushed and popped parameters via the stack, as you would expect, the FORTRAN compiler instead pointed a register at a parameter list in memory. The compilers then were DEC's FORTRAN-IV-PLUS and Oregon Pascal, which DEC later bought and renamed RSX Pascal. I also had to do some digging into assembly language listings from Hewlett-Packard's FORTRAN-1000 compiler running under RTE-A, and found that used the same technique, passing a pointer to a parameter list via a register. This is all ancient history now, I'm talking about back in the 1980s, but it may be relevant to doing parameter list conversions. I don't know how much of my FORTRAN I can remember, but I do know that mismatched COMMON blocks were a superb way of having your program disappear up its own CPU stack, I ended up putting in place a standard whereby all COMMON blocks had to be declared in an INCLUDE file, so that there was no possibility of mismatches. FORTRAN's parameter and type checking made C (note, no ++) look good. Brian. -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
2011/1/6 Birger Jansen bir...@cnoc.nl If l interpreted the screenshots correctly, it is plaxis: http://www.plaxis.nl/page/home/ You are correct, it is Plaxis. I did not do any work on the application itself, just did a pilot conversion to see how portable the code is to FPC. I believe this application, like many in its genre, works as 3 separate programs: input, processing, output. Processing is done in (I think) Fortran and the rest is Delphi. For this pilot I worked on the output only. thanks now I can see. Thanks to Vincent to Kind regards, Birger -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
2011/1/6 Salvatore Coppola coppolastu...@gmail.com: Hi Jansen although it is no longer my main job I am geotechnical engineer and I'm curious on the finite elements application: did you do it? is it in pascal? what is his name? If l interpreted the screenshots correctly, it is plaxis: http://www.plaxis.nl/page/home/ Vincent -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
If l interpreted the screenshots correctly, it is plaxis: http://www.plaxis.nl/page/home/ You are correct, it is Plaxis. I did not do any work on the application itself, just did a pilot conversion to see how portable the code is to FPC. I believe this application, like many in its genre, works as 3 separate programs: input, processing, output. Processing is done in (I think) Fortran and the rest is Delphi. For this pilot I worked on the output only. Kind regards, Birger -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
Bo Berglund wrote: 2) The fortran code failed to translate when it turned out that Fortran could change the type of a matrix multiplication depending on the dimensions of the two input matrices. You couldn't translate the code or the function declarations? Calling the fortran code from freepascal might be possible, then you don't have to translate the code itself, just call it. Micha -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
On 05.01.2011 18:33, Micha Nelissen wrote: Bo Berglund wrote: 2) The fortran code failed to translate when it turned out that Fortran could change the type of a matrix multiplication depending on the dimensions of the two input matrices. You couldn't translate the code or the function declarations? Calling the fortran code from freepascal might be possible, then you don't have to translate the code itself, just call it. This might not help him in the long run if he wants to port his project to x86_64 or even ARM. Regards, Sven -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
On 1/5/2011 12:33, Micha Nelissen wrote: Bo Berglund wrote: 2) The fortran code failed to translate when it turned out that Fortran could change the type of a matrix multiplication depending on the dimensions of the two input matrices. You couldn't translate the code or the function declarations? Calling the fortran code from freepascal might be possible, then you don't have to translate the code itself, just call it. this was discussed but IIRC it seemed that determining the proper calling procedures came up... if the library wasn't callable in pascal or C format or some such... one would need to be able to compile those libraries in a FPC/Lazarus compatible format for the normal callouts (is that the proper term) to work... since this was hard to do (ie: no compiler with this capability??) it was looked into that those routines could be recoded in pascal format... this too has not been able to be done because there's no available FORTRAN - PASCAL coder who can make the conversion... IIRC^2 : the original coder is long gone and no longer available for consultation... -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
2011/1/3 Birger Jansen bir...@cnoc.nl 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). Hi Jansen although it is no longer my main job I am geotechnical engineer and I'm curious on the finite elements application: did you do it? is it in pascal? what is his name? As for the viewer it look very professional so BRAVO! Regard Salvatore 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 -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
2011/1/4 Bo Berglund bo.bergl...@gmail.com Well, there were two different problems: 1) My intrinsic lack of Fortran know-how 2) The fortran code failed to translate when it turned out that Fortran could change the type of a matrix multiplication depending on the dimensions of the two input matrices. Sometimes the output was a simple vector and sometimes a true 2-d matrix and I failed to undretand how to translate these functions. It seemed like Fortran didn't give a damn about variable types and since Pascal is so strongly typed this made a big clash. I converted a fair amount of them but when I reached this problem I had a lot to go and gave up. Interesting. I don't know Fortran either but it looked like it could map directly to Pascal. Apparently it does not. Juha -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
On 01/04/2011 12:46 AM, Bo Berglund wrote: 2) The fortran code failed to translate when it turned out that Fortran could change the type of a matrix multiplication depending on the dimensions of the two input matrices. With Fortran in a function, the array idex bounds can be obtained from function parameters. This can be overcome by using dynamic arrays in Pascal. We (i.e. my son) once created a library with some matrix calculation/solving functions using dynamic arrays as vector and Matrix types. This worked out very nicely, e.g. as Pivoting results in very fast pointer operations that avoids moving the values around. -Michael -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:12:50 +0100, Michael Schnell mschn...@lumino.de wrote: On 01/04/2011 12:46 AM, Bo Berglund wrote: 2) The fortran code failed to translate when it turned out that Fortran could change the type of a matrix multiplication depending on the dimensions of the two input matrices. With Fortran in a function, the array idex bounds can be obtained from function parameters. This can be overcome by using dynamic arrays in Pascal. We (i.e. my son) once created a library with some matrix calculation/solving functions using dynamic arrays as vector and Matrix types. This worked out very nicely, e.g. as Pivoting results in very fast pointer operations that avoids moving the values around. -Michael OK, maybe I will have a restart on that project... In any case it has to be put off until my embedded project is done. But then I have the nagging feeling that maybe the Pascal implementation would not be as fast as the Fortran compiler's, which would then slow down the number crunching for large models. -- Bo Berglund Developer in Sweden -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
Juha Manninen schrieb: I converted a fair amount of them but when I reached this problem I had a lot to go and gave up. Interesting. I don't know Fortran either but it looked like it could map directly to Pascal. Apparently it does not. Fortran uses COMMON blocks for data storage, and it's up to the coder to specify the *intended* structure of every such memory block, in every module. Typically the structure is different in different modules, in detail with matrices. This is quite the opposite of Pascal type-safe declarations - more something like variant records with arbitrary (maybe same) field names for every variation :-( Fortran is different from almost every other programming language in many aspects, so that porting Fortran code to Pascal or even C is near impossible. Either get an Fortran compiler that can compile the code, or give up. DoDi -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
Impressive! Looks an idea candidate for being added here: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Application_Gallery -- Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
Hi Birger, The list is definitely of interest to me and others! If possible please create patches and add them to the bug tracker. This will help not only future conversions but ordinary projects as well. Regards, Darius On Jan 3, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Birger Jansen 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 screenshot 1.JPGscreenshot 2.JPGscreenshot 4.JPGscreenshot 6.JPG-- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
Hi Darius, The list is definitely of interest to me and others! If possible please create patches and add them to the bug tracker. This will help not only future conversions but ordinary projects as well. I'll clean up the list and post it on the mailing list. I didn't need to create any patches, most of the work was just to find out the Lazarus / FPC way of doing Delphi stuff and making some libraries work. Some patches that I needed (for generics and class functions) were already supplied by the team within a matter of hours after I submitted my problem. (Try that with Embarcadero...!) Kind regards, Birger -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 10:14:16 +0100, Birger Jansen bir...@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 -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
Hi Bo, 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... I didn't have a look at the processing part of the application, but I believe this is done in Fortran as well. 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. I did try to make the MDI forms work, but didn't found a good working solution. As a temp solution the main form keeps a list of all opened forms and has some functions to provide ActiveMDIChild and other MDI values. This works, but some interface redesign will make it better. Graphics were also provide by (a modified version of) GLScene, and I had very little problems with making this work. However, an older version of GLScene was used and while it supported Lazarus under Windows, Linux support was not available in that version. The reason for the conversion was also to be able to handle larger model sizes, we managed to load some models up to 4GB without problems. And of course compile also for Linux... Did you test your conversion also on Linux? We did some command line tests with Linux. Loading a model into memory and performing some basic calculations was no problem. However, in the available time that I had for this project I couldn't get the newer GLScene with Linux support to work, but I am convinced that it should be possible given enough time. Finally a little hint: JPG - PNG Thanks, I knew one of the two was better and I choose the wrong one. I'll remember for the next time. Kind regards, Birger -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
Op 2011-01-03 13:48, Bo Berglund het geskryf: 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... Very true! Also note that because PNG is non-lossy, the size could be large (150+ KB) per image. So if a small amount of color loss is not too important, then you can save the image as an Indexed PNG (and the 256 color Index Palette is optimised based on the image colors itself), it will greatly reduce the image size to just a few kilobytes. I often see images drop from 200KB to 20-30KB because of this. Gimp (free image editor for all platforms) does this very nice and easily. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
2011/1/3 Birger Jansen bir...@cnoc.nl 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. Such a list could also help a future automatic conversion. Currently any real projects are far away from automatic conversion. It would require deeper analysis of the code and replacing both classes and their methods with their FPC/Lazarus equivalents. Maybe some day... Juha -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
2011/1/3 Bo Berglund bo.bergl...@gmail.com 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... Bo, so you finally didn't get your Fortran code converted to Pascal. What was the main problem? Juha -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Project conversion Delphi - FreePascal: success!
On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 20:39:00 +0200, Juha Manninen juha.mannine...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/1/3 Bo Berglund bo.bergl...@gmail.com 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... Bo, so you finally didn't get your Fortran code converted to Pascal. What was the main problem? Juha Well, there were two different problems: 1) My intrinsic lack of Fortran know-how 2) The fortran code failed to translate when it turned out that Fortran could change the type of a matrix multiplication depending on the dimensions of the two input matrices. Sometimes the output was a simple vector and sometimes a true 2-d matrix and I failed to undretand how to translate these functions. It seemed like Fortran didn't give a damn about variable types and since Pascal is so strongly typed this made a big clash. I converted a fair amount of them but when I reached this problem I had a lot to go and gave up. -- Bo Berglund Developer in Sweden -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
