Re: anyone interested in decompilation

On Thursday 03 Aug 2006 23:49, dcorbit@connx.com wrote:
> You can't turn the DNA of a dead cow back into a cow.  That sort of
> thing only works on "Jurasic Park" movies.


Reengineering of assembler code to a high level language is certainly
possible
(see http://www.program-transformation.org/Transform/DecompilationPossible)
even for programs which were hand-written in assembler,
and not compiled from a high level language in the first place!


I have worked on several major commercial assembler to C migration projects:
each involving over half a million lines of hand-written assembler that was
migrated to efficient and maintainable C code. This paper is a good
starting point:


%A Martin Ward
%T Pigs from Sausages? Reengineering from Assembler to C via
FermaT Transformations
%J Science of Computer Programming,
Special Issue on Program Transformation
%E R. Lammel
%V 52
%N 1--3
%P 213-255
%D 2004


The core transformation engine used in these projects can be downloaded
from my web site: http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/fermat.html
or: http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/fermat.html


--
Martin


martin@gkc.org.uk http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/ Erdos number: 4

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