[HN Gopher] Dogbolt Decompiler Explorer
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       Dogbolt Decompiler Explorer
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 250 points
       Date   : 2023-12-04 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dogbolt.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dogbolt.org)
        
       | Arch-TK wrote:
       | HexRays online? Is that allowed?
        
         | sonicanatidae wrote:
         | Not anymore!
         | 
         |  _angrily writes a letter to his congressman who won 't
         | understand a word of it_
        
           | quickthrower2 wrote:
           | Your congressman doesn't yet have hexrays to decompile your
           | letter
        
             | exikyut wrote:
             | His brain is relegated to spewing out the Matrix unparsed
             | as he receives it. He gets none of the blondes, brunettes
             | or redheads.
        
         | rychco wrote:
         | When this first came out a year(ish?) ago, I remember seeing
         | somewhere that they had received permission from Hexrays/Ilfak
         | Guilfanov.
        
         | alright2565 wrote:
         | From the FAQ, Hex-Rays actually sponsors the project:
         | 
         | > Vector 35 and Hex-Rays jointly sponsor the hosting on Digital
         | Ocean as a community service.
        
           | cristeigabriel wrote:
           | It makes sense, it's a perfect advertisement of their
           | superiority.
        
             | Fabricio20 wrote:
             | Indeed, looking at the samples HexRays really did a great
             | job compared to the others, much more readable code.
        
       | cristeigabriel wrote:
       | Very nice. A parallel, I've been working on an emulator project
       | recently, implementing my own disassembler, and I keep thinking
       | about how I would turn patterns of machine code into a
       | generalized form, which could then be turned into something like
       | C-like pseudo-code, so it's been really compelling me lately to
       | implement my own toy decompiler
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _Decompiler Explorer_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32079227 - July 2022 (82
       | comments)
        
       | danielwmayer wrote:
       | The name of this is a reference to the incredibly useful godbolt
       | compiler explorer. If you are interested in this you will likely
       | enjoy the other as well:
       | 
       | https://godbolt.org/
        
         | reaperman wrote:
         | It might also be a bit of a portmanteau with a second reference
         | to dogpile.com which was a pre-Google "search engine" that
         | compiled search results from multiple search engines. Back in
         | the day you often had to separately search altavista.com,
         | lycos.com, askjeeves.com, yahoo.com, etc. because some of them
         | would work for your query but others would not and it was
         | difficult to predict the performance of any particular search
         | engine, but usually at least one of them would have the result
         | you wanted/needed.
         | 
         | Dogpile was an automated way to search all of the search
         | engines at the same time with one query.
         | 
         | https://web.archive.org/web/19990429194414/http://dogpile.co...
        
           | psifertex wrote:
           | I do remember dogpile, but as one of the folks who named it,
           | nope, that wasn't a conscious influence!
        
             | borski wrote:
             | Oh, it you! Hi Jordan I miss you let's hang out sometime :)
        
           | codetrotter wrote:
           | Look no further than https://dogbolt.org/faq
           | 
           | > It's meant to be the reverse of the amazing Compiler
           | Explorer.
           | 
           | With a link to https://godbolt.org/
           | 
           | It's very obvious that Dogbolt Decompiler Explorer is
           | primarily named after Godbolt Compiler Explorer.
        
         | riffraff wrote:
         | and for those who don't know it, that one is named after the
         | author, Matt Godbolt.
         | 
         | I thought for a longtime it was some joke I wasn't getting
         | related to deities smithing people.
        
           | Waterluvian wrote:
           | Damn. To just name something your last name.
           | 
           | I thought it was the sibling part to the Jesus Nut.
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut
        
             | jchw wrote:
             | Could be misremembering, but IIRC it was called Compiler
             | Explorer and used to live only on a subdomain of
             | godbolt.org. But, it was so useful that it became
             | presumably vastly higher traffic than the personal homepage
             | part and people often referred to it as just "Godbolt"
             | probably because it sounds cooler and is shorter than
             | saying "Compiler Explorer" (and it may not be obvious the
             | domain name is a last name rather than just a cool name for
             | something.)
        
               | Waterluvian wrote:
               | Now that's a pretty cool origin story for a name. What a
               | compliment!
        
             | mattgodbolt wrote:
             | It's never been called anything but either "GCC Explorer"
             | or "Compiler Explorer", by me, anyway... The URL it's
             | accessible for is an accident of the one I had hanging
             | around :) (it's now available at compiler-explorer.com too,
             | but...the name other people use has stuck so I'll never be
             | able to reclaim my own domain...)
        
               | Waterluvian wrote:
               | It's such a memorable name for a tool like that. Other
               | than losing your domain name to the topic, how do you
               | feel about the de facto name?
               | 
               | To a far far lesser degree, I've experienced many
               | examples of "you named it X but everyone at work calls it
               | Y and now you have to live with that." It used to really
               | irk me for some reason.
        
               | joemi wrote:
               | I think you _could_ reclaim your own domain if you
               | wanted. You'd want to have a banner at the top with a
               | clear note directing people to the new domain for the
               | compiler explorer, so that people realize immediately
               | that you're not domain squatting. A few people might put
               | up a stink, but I'm pretty confident that most people
               | wouldn't mind, especially since the tool itself is so
               | useful. The name, for those who don't know it as your
               | last name, is fun, but it isn't the reason people use the
               | tool. Eventually, over enough time, people would start
               | remembering the new URL, and you could shrink or remove
               | the banner (and/or put a note elsewhere on the page).
        
               | bombcar wrote:
               | Honestly "godbolt" is so memorable I can find it
               | instantly even though I rarely use it; but "compiler-
               | explorer" sounds like some generic SEO spam site that I'd
               | probably never click on.
        
               | nhatcher wrote:
               | It is fantastic name of an otherwise fantastic tool. The
               | day I found it was your last name made me chuckle and
               | liked it even more. And since I am here, thank you very
               | much for it!
               | 
               | I always call it the compiler explorer but the url, as a
               | sibling comment says, is memorable.
        
             | jjoonathan wrote:
             | To be fair it's an amazing last name and it feels like
             | there probably _is_ a story, it just has to do with this
             | guy 's ancestors rather than the assembler tool we all know
             | and love.
        
           | insulanus wrote:
           | > deities smithing people.
           | 
           | That's "deities smiting people.", but I really like the idea
           | of deities smithing people :)
        
             | pjmorris wrote:
             | There's a joke about Adam and Eve in here somewhere.
             | Genesis 2 for reference.
        
               | reactordev wrote:
               | Sculpty terracotta would be a fitting choice. It's pretty
               | easy to sculpt when kneaded, bakes in a traditional oven,
               | keeps it's details. Perfect for silicone mold making.
        
             | stcredzero wrote:
             | This happens in the Norse myths.
        
       | iBotPeaches wrote:
       | Love this - I can almost imagine the convincing for other
       | companies wasn't even needed when they realized a small binary
       | size and comparison to competitors would net them more business.
       | A perfect little solution for triaging issues between services
       | and comparing solutions.
        
         | psifertex wrote:
         | That was indeed the logic. The two main commercial solutions
         | included (Binary Ninja made by Vector 35, where I'm one of hte
         | founders) and Hex-Rays both pay for all the hosting costs. And
         | it's not particularly cheap -- there's a fair amount of compute
         | to drive the decompilers especially as some of them are... not
         | very efficient.
        
       | rixtox wrote:
       | I really wish a similar tool for exploring binary lifting to
       | different IRs. Like Ghidra p-code with sleigh, LLVM Machine IR,
       | Qemu TCG etc
        
         | psifertex wrote:
         | IRs aren't generally suited toward small snippets of
         | examination by human when you're starting with a full binary. I
         | would imagine something like that would only work well when
         | done for very small bits of assembly. Likewise, you might be
         | interested in BNIL which is an entire stack of ILs that Binary
         | Ninja is based on. (You can see it exposed in the
         | cloud.binary.ninja UI or the demo)
        
       | hoosieree wrote:
       | Wow, I really could have used this for my Ph.D. research (deep
       | learning for obfuscated code).
       | 
       | I ditched Ghidra in my experiments in favor of angr early on
       | because Ghidra did _not_ play nicely with multiprocessing and I
       | had a lot of data to process. Well maybe it does but it was much
       | easier for me to achieve the same thing with angr.
       | 
       | Love the name! Although I feel compelled to point out that
       | Compiler Explorer is the name of the project and Godbolt is its
       | author's last name, but I suppose if people are to the point of
       | using Godbolt as a verb the ship has sailed.
        
         | psifertex wrote:
         | We know! Similarly, the GH repo is actually the Decompiler
         | Explorer:
         | 
         | https://github.com/decompiler-explorer/decompiler-explorer/
        
       | w10-1 wrote:
       | OMG I am so happy
       | 
       | Of note: HexRays is not only cleaner, but right now their queue
       | is mostly empty while others are backed up.
        
       | Carbocarde wrote:
       | > All submitted binaries are saved and made available to any of
       | the authors of the tools used so they may improve their
       | decompilers. If you're such an author who would like access, let
       | us know!.
       | 
       | oof
        
         | CaliforniaKarl wrote:
         | Good that this is clearly mentioned up-front on their site.
        
         | einpoklum wrote:
         | If you believe that content you submit to websites is not
         | examined by interested parties associated with that website,
         | then - I have a bridge to sell you... or perhaps I should say a
         | Google account to give you, free of charge.
        
         | smegsicle wrote:
         | so like vscode?
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-04 23:00 UTC)