logoalt Hacker News

RandomTeaPartyyesterday at 12:00 PM2 repliesview on HN

My general experience with decompilation has been very negative (rough and not ready for use)

It feels like tool devs target byte editting more than refactoring decompiled code into something readable - you can't move lines of code, can't flip statement checked in if() for early return

Author of this article mentioned "byte euivalence", and while I'd be fine with functional sameness, I imagine provably-reversible refactor steps would be of great help for everyone


Replies

pederyesterday at 5:14 PM

Not sure if you're a .NET/C# person, but PDBs are a bit different tho in that they contain full debug information and you can absolutely decompile a .DLL + .PDB combo. Very successfully even in the case of obfuscation.

show 1 reply
direwolf20yesterday at 1:24 PM

Hm, I wrote a decompiler that does this. Maybe I should work on it more.

show 2 replies