As for the question of what to expect from binary decompilation, I’d sum-
marize by saying binary decompilation is possible—it all boils down to setting
people’s expectations. Native code decompilation is “no silver bullet”, to bor-
row from that famous line by Brooks—it cannot bring back 100 percent accu-
rate high-level language code from executable binaries. Still, a working native
code decompiler could produce an approximation of the original source code
and do wonders to the reversing process by dramatically decreasing the
amount of time it takes to reach an understanding of a complex program for
which source code is not available.
There is certainly a lot to hope for in the field of binary decompilation. We
have not yet seen what a best-of-breed native code decompiler could do when
it is used with high quality library signatures and full-blown prototypes for
operating system calls, and so on. I always get the impression that many peo-
ple don’t fully realize just how good an output could be expected from such a
tool. Hopefully, time will tell.478 Chapter 13