On Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 08:46:44PM -0700, Charles Polisher wrote: > Peter Jay Salzman writes: > > but what if you don't? or rather, what if you can't compile with -g?
if you "don't [compile with -g]" you recompile with -g. if you "can't [compile with -g]" you don't have source and shouldn't be trying to debugging the program at all. so you submit a bug report to the vendor of the commercial software you are using and if they don't fix it you switch to something else or write your own program that does the same thing. :) > What you're looking for is a decompiler, such as the > one described in Cifuentes, but they're scarce as > hen's teeth: I think there are a few possible reasons why disassemblers are painful and decompilers don't exist... - in the software world "reverse engineering" has been deemed evil by the big software houses of the world and is against the rules of most commercial software licenses. - some of us in an source code available world. if you have the source code you wouldn't want to disassemble anything unless maybe you are looking for bugs in the assembler (because the compiler toolchain spits out assembly code it's simple to see bugs in that :) - if you have a big blob of compiled code and no source, it is almost always easier to just write replacement code to do what the blob does, then to painfully reconstruct the program from assembly. - _so_ much useful information is lost in the compilation process like comments and variable names, imagine taking something as trivial as the gzip command, strip all comments and change all variables to useless names... 'v1', 'v2', 'v3'. One could spend weeks trying to convert that into something understandable. _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
