Al,

>> I was under the impression C++ (NOT the .Net variety) was difficult to
>> impossible to decompile. I seem to recall reading somewhere that someone
>> had claimed to be able to decompile VC++6 and this caused a large
>> discussion. Don't recall if any other C++ compiler (e.g. open source) was
>> involved.

It is not difficult to decompile a C++ EXE/DLL in fact you could say that in the majority of cases it is almost trivial. Granted all you've got is an assembler listing but my point is that this is enough source code to give you the ability to gain access and an understanding to intellectual property.

It is difficult to reconstitute the original C++ source code. One of the main problems with generating C++ source code is that 9/10 the object code you are dissasembling is not the same as the source that was compiled, the optimiser will do all kinds of things to your source before it is persisted to disk. Also unlike VFP, .NET the variables, data structures, methods etc. are (to put it simply) memory locations, so you have a very different disk based representation without much in the way of help.

So in summary, decompilation is typically easy - getting the original source code in the form of:

#include <stdio.h>

void main(void)
{
   printf("Hello World");
}

... is difficult - probably impossible.

Regards
Neil