Boomerang

A general, open source, retargetable decompiler of machine code programs

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Introduction

This project is an attempt to develop a real decompiler for machine code programs through the open source community. A decompiler takes as input an executable file, and attempts to create a high level, compilable, possibly even maintainable source file that does the same thing. It is therefore the opposite of a compiler, which takes a source file and makes an executable. However, a general decompiler does not attempt to reverse every action of the decompiler, rather it transforms the input program repeatedly until the result is high level source code. It therefore won't recreate the original source file; probably nothing like it. It does not matter if the executable file has symbols or not, or was compiled from any particular language. (However, declarative languages like ML are not considered.)

The intent is to create a retargetable decompiler (i.e. one that can decompile different types of machine code files with modest effort, e.g. X86-windows, sparc-solaris, etc). It was also intended to be highly modular, so that different parts of the decompiler can be replaced with experimental modules. It was intended to eventually become interactive, a la IDA Pro, because some things (not just variable names and comments, though these are obviously very important) require expert intervention. Whether the interactivity belongs in the decompiler or in a separate tool remains unclear.

By transforming the semantics of individual instructions, and using powerful techniques such as Static Single Assignment dataflow analysis, Boomerang should be (largely) independent of the exact behaviour of the compiler that happened to be used. Optimisation should not affect the results. Hence, the goal is a general decompiler.

More information at the General decompilation Wiki pages:

• Main Decompilation page
  
• Is it Possible? (for those in denial)
• Why Decompilation?
  
• The Legality of decompilation
  

News

12/May/2005: Sourceforge have changed the names of the CVS servers. That means that existing repositories will not work as they stand. You can change the name with a few Unix commands like this:
Create a file called changeit with this contents:

mv $1 $1.old
sed -e s/@cvs/.sourceforge/.net/@boomerang.cvs.sourceforge.net/ $1.old > $1

chmod +x changeit
find . -name Root -exec /absolute/path/to/changeit {} /;

Try to execute this command only once, otherwise the Root.old files will be overwritten.
Of course, if you have made no changes to your checked out source, you can just get a fresh checkout. The changes are listed in the FAQ question 13, but the only change is from cvs.sourceforge.net to boomerang.cvs.sourceforge.net. (Also note that the ":80" as was used on the cvs page doesn't work any more either.) We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is out of our hands.

10/Apr/2006: Boomerang doesn't seem to be able to compile the loader/MachOBinaryFile.cpp source code, so until some kind soul who knows about such things can fix it, using the MachOBinaryFile loader is now disabled if the host is Cygwin. At least that way, a Cygwin hosted Boomerang will compile, and can decompile programs other than in the MachO binaryfile format.

http://boomerang.sourceforge.net/