Ilfakss: Return to the sources?
Ero Carrera (ero) <erocarreragmailcom> Thursday, January 19 2006 14:55.00 CST


Ilfaks  Return to the sources? makes for an interesting read on the problem of decompilation. I agree with such views.
Ive always been thinking of decompilation in terms of generating a higher level representation of some lower level code. Information is lost in the process of compiling, so expecting to retrieve code which resembles the original is wishful thinking to say the least. Unless the compilation process in known and an injective map from a set of high level constructs to a set low level ones exists, in that case one could use that information in order to reconstruct those higher level constructs. Although, nowadays, with the amount of optimization such as branchless logic, code scheduling, etc such occurrence is rare.

However, as Ilfak mentions, trying to extract higher lever features from a mathematical representation of the lower level code might actually produce results and I personally think thats the way to go...

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Posted: Wednesday, December 31 1969 18:00.00 CST