Ilfak just announced a new addition to IDA (>= 5.1), which will provide full decompilation to source code. Interesting indeed.

http://hexblog.com/2007/04/decompilation_gets_real.html

I'll be the first to say this

FUCKIN' AWESOME!

Might finally be worth upgrading

...although I'm still a bit puzzled as to why such a thing wasn't invented sooner; I mean, compilers have been around longer than I am, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to notice they generated code with predetermined patterns. Or, maybe this is the first public announcement...

edit: I wonder how Delphi or Asm would be decompiled into... C

although, that would be great, I kind of wandering how software developers would feel about it. After all, this would make easier for anyone to reverse the executable.

By the way, is this tool will be a pluging on IDA 5.1? or it will be part of IDA 5.1?

Oh wow. Does that ever look sexy. I really wish that Ilfak would sell to students...

Ah well. Any rumors on a release date?

To call this decompilation would go a bit far... prettified disassembly would be closer to the truth I think. Nothing new, just eyecandy that makes it a bit easier to understand.

In fact Desquirr (http://desquirr.sourceforge.net/) has been around for quite some time.

I hope I live to see the day when programs can be decompiled into compilable source code sans comments and original variables names, then recompiled into identical binary output using the compiler that produced the original executable. That would be "true" reverse engineering -- decompiling a program, editing the source, then recompiling. Either open-source and non-commercial software will become dominant ("if you don't open the source, anyone can open it for you", or (this would be horrible) new laws would be implemented restricting decompilers.

.NET is pretty much there, although its not what I would consider "executable" code.

But between ILDASM and ILASM I've manage to "fix" a couple programs that didn't behave nicely.

Ho-hum! I think its frightfully ordinary. Its mostly pseudocrap and free plugins do an equally better job. Ilfak and Pierre seem to be running out of ideas to market IDA. Case of "fuck! 5.0 got warezed. How do we get them to buy 5.1?" anyways good for trying out on winzip etc...

Indeed, and there are true decompilers (e.g. .NET Reflector) which can decompile .NET into C#, J#, or even VB.NET, and the result will compile and behave the same as the original. One of the reasons why I view .NET (and Java) as more of a scripting language/system.

Call me crazy, but this is the best decompiler output that I've seen so far, and I've tried Desquirr, Inquisition, Boomerang, and all the others that I've ever known to exist.
Aimless, which plugin(s) are you referring to that do a better job?

holy shit,

i missed that post nod, nod, its absolutely fucking great
i know a bit about the problematic when building disassemblers / code analysis, and to come to such an output ... just

i agree with aimless, too, it is to be seen how well that will work on "any" binary. for sure the accuracy will vary between targets.
its also a question of usefullness ... i am not usre, but think it can make rce easier to see some stuff in C. i think its at least good to translate blocks of code, not really full executables ...

anyway, i want it! want to play with that ...

cheers, 0xf001

It is now in private beta phase, and got a name: Hex-Rays

Some, docs and more info here:

http://www.hexblog.com/hexrays/manual/

Looks really promising!