Why Decompilers cant produce original code theoret

问题:

I searched the internet but did not find a concrete answer that why decompilers are unable to produce original source code. I dint get a satisfactory answer. Somewhere it was written that it is similar to halting problem but dint tell how. So what is the theoretical and technical limitation of creating a decompiler which is perfect.

回答1:

It is, quite simply, a many-to-one problem. For example, in C:

b++;

and

b+=1;

and

b = b + 1;

may all get compiled to the same set of operations once the compiler and optimizer are done. It reorders things, drops in-effective operations, and rewrites entire sections of code. By the time it is done, it has no idea what you wrote, just a pretty good idea what you intended to happen, at a raw-CPU (or vCPU) level.

It is even smart enough to remove variables that aren't needed:

{
a=5;
b=func();
c=a+b;
d=func2(c);
}
## gets rewritten as:
REGISTERA=func()
REGISTERA+=5
return(func2(REGISTERA))

回答2:

For starters, the variable names are never preserved when your program is compiled. ...so the best it could possibly do would be to use meaningless variable names throughout your re-constituted program. Compiling is generally a one-way transformation - like a one-way hashing function. Like the hash, it may be possible to generate something else that could hash to the same value, but it's highly unlikely the decompiled program will be the exact same as your original.

回答3:

Compilers throw out information; not all the information that is in the source code is in the compiled code. For example in compiled Java, you can't tell the difference between a parameterized and unparameterized generic type because the information is only used by the compiler; some annotations are only used at compile time and are not included in the compiled output. That doesn't mean you couldn't get some sort of source code by decompiling; it just wouldn't match nor would be as informative as the actual source code.

回答4:

There is usually not a 1-to-1 correspondence between source code and compiled code. If an essentially infinite number of possible sources could result in the same object code (given unbounded variable name lengths, etc.), how is a decompiler to guess which one to spit out?