On 10/6/2010 17:34, Bo Berglund wrote:
I have a question that might be OT here, but I will try nevertheless:

i don't see anything OT about it but then again, i'm just a lowly user like you 
:P

We have a Windows application written in Delphi for data analysis and
display.
It uses GLScene as the data rendering engine and it uses 3 Fortran
DLL:s to do the number crunching.

ok...

I want to port the whole thing to Lazarus/FPC and I have seen that
GLScene is available for Lazarus (see separate thread).
So far it looks promising, but I also need to handle the three Fortran
DLL:s.

ok... so... if the routines and actual work are known and understood, they should be easy enough to convert rather than attempting to maintain old unsupported code...

in reality, you're only possibly looking at converting the FORTRAN code to PASCAL code... it is doubtful that you'll need any object type stuff if it is just straight forward "old style" procedural code...

They were made using an Intel Fortran compiler plugged into Visual
Studio several years back. The developer is no longer with us, but the
sources (and the Windows compiler are).

that's at least one GoodThing<tm> ;)

So my question now is if there is any experience of either porting
Fortran code to FPC or of compiling Fortran code for a Windows DLL
into the corresponding function in Linux?

not sure about this but if the code is there and someone can understand it, it certainly should be easy enough to re-write it in PASCAL... or C or C++ or php or <insert your favorite modern language here> ;)

(By te way, is there such a thing as a DLL in Linux?)

i can definitely answer this last question! :lol;

yes... there certainly is... they are the libraries... in many cases they are named like foo.so or foo.1.2.3.4.so...

FWIW: there is probably a FORTRAN compiler for *nix... whether or not it can take your existing FORTRAN code and compile it to a library for *nix is another question... and, as noted above, there may not be any real need to keep those routines in FORTRAN... it may be pretty easy to convert them to PASCAL (or any other of today's languages)... it really depends on the code and, in the case of math functions, the precision needed...

HTH in some small way...

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

Reply via email to