>>>>Tore,
>>>>
>>>>Which development tool/language available today gives you the ability to protect your source code?
>>>
>>>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.
>>
>>You can decompile any code since it is "simply" the correlation of code with the machine instructions being used. The concept is straight forward but the implementation of a decompiler is very complicated.
>>
>>If you are an assembly programmer though you can get the gist of any code since you can decompile any application to assembly. The difference with the different languages is in the ease of converting the machine code to the high level code of a specific programming language. A good understanding of the compiler makes it easier since you can predict what the compiler's input was to produce the output.
>>
>>Its all a matter of the resolve of the person who wants the information about your application.
>
>I Googled "c++ decompilation". Viewing threads in Groups such as comp.lang.c++, the consensus seems to be it's not possible at this point, nor is likely ever to be practical, to decompile an optimized C++ binary into meaningful C++ source for an app of "substance". For example, http://groups.google.ca/groups?q=c%2B%2B+decompilation&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=hvWdnQ-rScVVO5yiXTWJgQ%40giganews.com&rnum=5
>
>Lots of people claim it should be possible - but I could find no reference to any commercial general-purpose C++ decompiler, anywhere.
>
>As an interesting side note - the top "sponsored link" when I ran the Google search was, "Enjoying Decompilation? Consider working for Google. www.google.com/jobs". Should we be worried? < g >


That is very scary. What is Google preparing to reverse engineer?

You may not find a decompiler that spits out clean code, but my point was that you can decompile an application to code that can be interpreted by a human. It may not be pretty, but with enough resolve you can trace the assembly code to see what the program is doing. This is a common way of hacking software. You normally do this to beat license protection becuase you inject jmp statements to bypass the license routines.