fenynro

@fenynro@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't code be uncompiled?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably depends on how comfortable you are at reading assembly instructions for your specific CPU, but I think generally the contextless source code is probably preferable. Either way you’ve got a headache of an investigation in front of you though.

  here’s an example of what it might look like with either option

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't code be uncompiled?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends on the specifics of how the language is conlmpiled. I’ll use C# as an example since that’s what I’m currently working with, but the process is different between all of them.

  C#, when compiled, actually gets compressed down to what is known as an intermediate language (MSIL for C# specifically). This intermediate file is basically a set of genericized instructions that are not linked to any specific CPU. This is useful because different CPUs require different instructions.

  Then, when the program is run a second compiler, known as the Just In Time compiler, takes the intermediate commands and translates them into something directly relevant to the CPU being used.

  When we decompile a C# dll, we’re really converting from the intermediate language (generic CPU-agnostic instructions) and translating it back into source code.

  To your second point, you are correct that the decompiled version will be more efficient from a processing perspective, but that efficiency comes at the direct cost of being able to easily understand what is happening at a human level.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't code be uncompiled?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The long answer involves a lot of technical jargon, but the short answer is that the compilation process turns high level source code into something that the machine can read, and that process usually drops a lot of unneeded data and does some low-level optimization to make things more efficient during actual processing.

  One can use a decompiler to take that machine code and attempt to turn it back into something human readable, but will usually be missing data on variable names, function calls, comments, etc. which makes it nearly impossible to reconstruct fully