On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Mitch Miller wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Randy Poon wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I heard somebody said, we can get back the source code from a Java executable
> > program easily by running some reverse engineering software. Is this true? Does
> > the same apply to the C Language? If so, our C programs will be highly
> > unprotected, which is something I don't want to see!
>
> You have to first obtain the object code / binary, but once you have that,
> and know the type of processor it was compiled for, it could be reverse
> engineered into source code again.  The ones I've seen won't necessarily
> have the same code labels as in your original source, since many
> (most) compiled binaries don't contain them.  That would not, however,
> keep the decompiler from assigning arbitrary labels to points in code it
> sees as being "called" or "jmp"ed to.

And I think the chances of getting readable, useful C or Java from
de-compiling code would be pretty slim.  There are a hundred different
ways to write the same thing in C...  well, a hundred in Perl, maybe a
dozen in C!  8-)  Disassembling is easy, decompiling would be hard.

Dale

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