Part of the RTL2 project, this is a Delphi-compatible RTL and non-visual VCL library implementation for the Elements compiler (and more specifically, the Oxygene language).
The goal of this project is to reproduce a reasonable subset of standard Delphi APIs used by a large percentage of Delphi code bases, in order to facilitate and ease the porting of such code bases to Oxygene to re-use business logic in .NET, Cocoa, Java/Android or Island applications.
The goal is most decidedly not to get existing Delphi projects or applications to just recompile out of the box. The differences between the platforms are too significant, and there is only so much abstraction a library such as this can provide; some changes to exiting code will continue to be required for it to build in Oxygene, and some paradigms need to be rethought to fit in well with the platforms.
The scope of this project is purposely limited to simple APIs, commonly used low-level helper functions (such as SysUtils.pas) and simple classes (such as TStringList), as well as to make core types such as Object and String more compatible with Delphi code. Decidedly out of scope are UI level libraries such as the VCL or FMX, Delphi's TDataSet-based database layer, or anything on that level.
This library is implemented fully from scratch, without referencing or reusing any of Delphi's or FPCs implementation of the same functionality. Merely the outward-facing API is kept identical and compatible with Delphi's version of the RTL/VCL.
Where possible, the library is targeted to work well for code coming from both older (ca. Delphi 6/7) and more recent Delphi version; while it does/will support AnsiStrings it does strongly favor UTF-16 unicode strings (aka WideStrings), as used both by newer Delphi versions and all of Elements' target platforms.
This library is a work in progress; all functionality presented is useable now, and it will be expanded and grown over time.
Community contributions, pull requests and other feedback are highly welcome.
As of this writing, the Delphi RTL library requires the latest Elements 8.4 compiler to be built and to be used.
- RemObjects Elements Homepage
- RemObjects Elements Docs
- Delphi RTL on docs.elementscompiler.com