[fpc-pascal] Status of Lazarus

[David Chandler]

Thank you all who responded to my initial inquiry.  Your responses were 
helpful.

I am starting to get into Lazarus, as recommended by others on this 
list, but I wonder about its limitations, given that it is still in Beta 
release.  I have a large DOS era shareware astronomy program written in 
Borland Pascal I want to port to a Windows and possibly also a cross 
platform environment.  (There are a lot of other astronomy programs out 
there, but this one still has some unique features.)  Are there major 
unresolved issues or unsupported features in Lazarus that would likely 
throw up road blocks if I take the plunge with a real project?  Is 
printing to network and high res color printers in a Windows environment 
transparent and problem free?  I also need serial communications support 
to interface with telescopes.  The DOS version communicates over an 
RS232 port, but I would like to add/substitute USB support.  How about 
file transfer across the internet from within the program?  I don't have 
this feature in the DOS version, but I would like to add it.  Would 
these kinds of issues be barriers to cross platform development?    
--David Chandler

(By the way, is there anyone out there who would like to collaborate on 
the project?  If so, contact me individually <david at davidchandler.com>.  
It is a star mapping program called Deep Space that does a lot with 
multiple map projections, comet and asteroid computations, multiple 
databases, telescope pointing control, and more.)