Is there a decompiler that will work on Visual Studio 6 C++

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Is there a decompiler that will work on Visual Studio 6 C++

I have a project that I am trying to fix from a guy that left (let go) from my company. He has violated every fundamental principle of software engineering, not using source control, not backing up the source before you make more changes, etc. etc.

I need to make changes to an application that is in the field and I don't have the original source code, but I have an executable. What I need is a decompiler that will decompile a Visual Studio 6 C++ application and provide me with some type of source code. Anyone got any ideas.....

+3 A:

Decompile to what - assembler?

There isn't anything that is going to give you meaningfull C from an exe.

Martin Beckett 2010-10-13 21:50:07

As Vinzenz has pointed out - there is at least one product that can do this (to be fair - I would not expect the generated code to be as meaningful as the original C++ source).

Doc Brown 2010-10-13 22:06:32

@Doc Brown: With your work of renaming variables and function names after analyzing them and writing comments you can get a lot from that. Just watch the short decompilation demo on the page I linked. But of course it won't be like the original but that's basically just 'lost in translation' ;-) But still it is amazing what it can produce.

Vinzenz 2010-10-13 22:13:59

That's pretty impressive (at least for the examples they show) decompilers used to be worse than just reading the asm

Martin Beckett 2010-10-13 23:15:13

+4 A:

Well there's the Decompiler from Hex-Rays: http://www.hex-rays.com/decompiler.shtml

It is pretty good for the fact that it is creating C code from Assembler but it works pretty good. It's also pretty expensive

Edit: Additional note it is combined with IDA Pro the pretty well-known disassembler from them. That already can show you a lot of information in the combination with the decompiler it is even easier to reverse code.

Vinzenz 2010-10-13 21:55:09

+1 IDA Pro + Hexrays as it does make use of knowledge of win32 to help decompile and give better code.

Greg Domjan 2010-10-13 22:10:53

Expensive, but if it does the job well it's possibly worth it. I do wonder why the ARM version is $1 (or €1) more than the x86 version?

Michael Burr 2010-10-14 01:01:31

In german there'd be a good joke about that: 'Die wollen uns wohl auf den ARM nehmen' unfortunately it's not so nice translated. The only reason I could imagine is that they want to show that this is not included and that both have different prices. (Just a wild guess)

Vinzenz 2010-10-14 01:05:04

I've used RecStudio (rec22) and IDAPro to try and decompile a C++ project, together they probably wouldn't have been enough to do the job I had except that I worked out the demo project the program was based on so they gave just enough info that I could make something like the same project again.

In the end one other thing I was doing was compiling code that I thought matched and checking that I got the same result in the decompiler.

Good Luck.

Greg Domjan 2010-10-13 22:19:14

ansaurus

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Is there a decompiler that will work on Visual Studio 6 C++

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