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About LinkBacksokay, i have an app on my computer and i wish to see it's source code, the codes you write on a compiler. Hex editor? sorry im a noob at these things
This is a discussion on view source code within the C Programming forums, part of the General Programming Boards category; okay, i have an app on my computer and i wish to see it's source code, the codes you write ...
okay, i have an app on my computer and i wish to see it's source code, the codes you write on a compiler. Hex editor? sorry im a noob at these things
You can't. Once it's compiled, the knowledge of the source code is lost.Originally Posted by geniusisgenius
Code://try //{ if (a) do { f( b); } while(1); else do { f(!b); } while(1); //}
You can display it in assembly if you want, but I don't think this is 100% legal. Most companies try to make so-called reverse-engineering impossible to protect their programs from being cracked or copied.
brewbuck: lol @ your sig
oh ok thanks, so whats a hex editor??
Whether it legal kind of depends on your location. Companies often claim it's illegal, but in most circumstances it's perfectly legal to reverse engineer it (citation needed :P). I believe that in most countries/states it's even legal to crack the code and distribute and even use it - as long as it's used for legal purposes.
"I am probably the laziest programmer on the planet, a fact with which anyone who has ever seen my code will agree." - esbo, 11/15/2008
"the internet is a scary place to be thats why i dont use it much." - billet, 03/17/2010
Reverse engineering might be in violation of an EULA but it's not a "go to prison" crime or anything like that.
As somebody whose job involves a lot of reverse engineering, I don't worry about it. We aren't stealing secrets, we're trying to get systems to interoperate with other systems (something which is explicitly allowed by the law)
Code://try //{ if (a) do { f( b); } while(1); else do { f(!b); } while(1); //}
Compiling a program is like baking a cake.
Once it's done you can't reduce it back into the flour, sugar, and butter etc that it was made from.
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Advice: Take only as directed - If symptoms persist, please see your debugger
Linus Torvalds: "But it clearly is the only right way. The fact that everybody else does it some other way only means that they are wrong"
Yeah, entropy's a beach ain't it?
I used to be an adventurer like you... then I took an arrow to the knee.
A hex editor is a program that reads ASCII from files and prints the hex code and the eight bits for each byte.
Interesting to think about it from that perspective. Compilation is inherently an information-losing process, since multiple source level constructs could, in theory, map to identical machine code. But if information is actually lost, then this corresponds to a decrease in entropy, not an increase. At first glance, that is. I wonder if anybody has ever approached the topic of decompilation from an info-theoretic standpoint.
Code://try //{ if (a) do { f( b); } while(1); else do { f(!b); } while(1); //}
At least a fully optimized program should be very difficult to impossible to reverse-engineer.
Well, as brewbuck said, that looks as a decrease in entropy, but as far as I know this is impossible since entropy always increases or stays constant for a while. Actually it increases in general since the platform itself increases entropy at least by using electricity.
I fear that one day we will run out of order in the universe.
