Re: decompiler & static symbolic analysis

Vijay Ganesh <vgee@india.ti.com> writes:
>[From "asm" to C. But there are these problems...]


I believe that in the general case, deterining whether a given
instruction is the target of a branch requires something like a
solutinon to the halting problem. There are many techniques that give
approximate answers.


A few interesting papers are Cathy May's "Mimic" paper, which shows
analysis deferre until the new program is running and it adaptively
updates the code for the translation as new entry points are
discovered; the Larus et al. papers on EEL which show some interesting
approximate techniques, and the larger body of work on decompilers,
such as work by C. Cifuentes on x86-to-C decompilation.


Blowing my own horn, there's a lot of references to these and other
papers on the instruction-set simulation and tracing page I maintain,
it's at "http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/pardo/sim.d/index.html".


;-D on ( Decomplier ) Pardo


%A Cathy May
%T Mimic: A Fast S/370 Simulator
%J Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1987 Symposium on Interpreters and
Interpretive Techniques; SIGPLAN Notices
%V 22
%N 6
%C St. Paul, MN
%D June 1987
%P 1-13
%X Uses RTCG to simulate an IBM S/370 on an IBM RT at about 4
n-instructions per p-instruction, not including the cost of
translation.
[Mimic was an important project, inspired most of the software x86
systems now on the market. Less well known but at about the same time
with similar techniques was Peter Woon's simulator that ran RT ROMP
code on a 370. -John]
--

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