[0]: https://thejunkland.com/blog/using-llms-to-reverse-javascrip...
[1]: https://github.com/jehna/humanify/blob/main/README.md#exampl...
That really deserves a link. What is an “analytical” decompiler?
> Stiver decided to write his own decompiler as a side project. To overcome the weaknesses of existing alternatives, he took a different approach. After reading the bytecode, he constructed a control-flow graph in static single-assignment form, which is much better to express the program semantics abstracting the particular shape of bytecode. At the beginning of this project, Stiver knew little about static analysis and compiler design and had to learn a lot, but the effort was worth it. The resulting decompiler produced much better results than anything available at that time. It could even decompile the bytecode produced by some obfuscators without any explicit support.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2024/11/in-memory-of-stiver/
Answer is pretty vague though, but sounds like it’s about not trying to “reverse” what the compiler did, but rather try and “analytically” work put what source code would likely have yielded the byte code it’s looking at?
If you have a block of code a compiler will compile a language expression or statement into a particular set of assembly/bytecode instructions. For example converting `a + b` to `ADD a b`.
A reversing decompiler will look at the `ADD a b` and produce `a + b` as the output. This is the simplest approach as it is effectively just a collection of these types of mapping. While this works, it can be harder to read and noisier than the actual code. This is because:
1. it does not handle annotations like @NotNull correctly -- these are shown as `if (arg == null) throw ...` instead of the annotation because the if/throw is what the compiler generated for that annotation;
2. it doesn't make complex expressions readable;
3. it doesn't detect optimizations like unrolling loops, reordering expressions, etc.
For (1) an analytical decompiler can recognize the `if (arg == null) throw` expression at the start of the function and map that to a @NotNull annotation.
Likewise, it could detect other optimizations like loop unrolling and produce better code for that.
So if I'd have to give a definition I pulled out of my ass:
* non-analytical compiler: "local", works only at the instruction or basic-block level, probably done by just pattern matching templates
* analytical: anything that does non-local transformations, working across basic-blocks to recover logic and control flow
Over in .NET land, dnSpy (https://github.com/dnSpyEx/dnSpy) works very well, even on many obfuscated binaries.
I found this amusing, from a Java perspective. The 3-character command-line options are also very "not Java-ish". However, since this one is also written in Java, a good test is if it can decompile itself perfectly and the result recompiled to a matching binary; much like how bootstrapping a compiler involves compiling itself and checking for the existence of the fixed-point.
https://old.reddit.com/r/java/comments/ue8u59/new_open_sourc...
A little more info in this thread as well:
https://old.reddit.com/r/java/comments/ue8u59/new_open_sourc...
(It was earlier named Quiltflower and is actually a combination of multiple Fernflower forks from its' gh README)
Would ideally expect the project site/github to list out how's the fork different though.
[I work at JetBrains]
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding you, but even if the bytecode sequence is reconstructed as the original code that produced it, stuff like whitespace and comments are simply lost with no ways to recover.
(Also, local variable names, certain annotations depending on their retention level, etc)
However, most of the time it'll output perfectly valid Java code that'll compile if you just create the necessary maven/ant/gradle build configuration to get all of the sources loaded correctly.
I had decompiled the class, fixed the issue, checked in the original decompiled source and then the change. Then a coworker pointed out that the original decompiled source also fixed the issue.
After a bit of digging, I learned that hotspot compiler had code to detect and fix the issue, but it was looking for the pattern generated by a modern compiler, and the library was compiled with an older compiler.
(It's been a while, but I think it was the JAI library, and the issue was triggered by long comments in a PNG.)
