From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 25223 invoked by alias); 6 Sep 2007 21:18:58 -0000 Received: (qmail 25214 invoked by uid 22791); 6 Sep 2007 21:18:58 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from rv-out-0910.google.com (HELO rv-out-0910.google.com) (209.85.198.184) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:18:54 +0000 Received: by rv-out-0910.google.com with SMTP id l15so209761rvb for ; Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:18:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.141.28.12 with SMTP id f12mr430801rvj.1189113530987; Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:18:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.141.51.11 with HTTP; Thu, 6 Sep 2007 14:18:50 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <1a47b9f10709061418h4b60ed07od05d07718e4809b5@mail.gmail.com> Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:33:00 -0000 From: "Prasanna .S" To: gdb@sourceware.org Subject: Fwd: Decompiler program In-Reply-To: <1a47b9f10709061417t6a8778bboe741ecbe31c2b0eb@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <1a47b9f10709061414m3344094m1f9da016cf1f765c@mail.gmail.com> <1a47b9f10709061417t6a8778bboe741ecbe31c2b0eb@mail.gmail.com> Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2007-09/txt/msg00060.txt.bz2 Hi, I am a student in India. I am not very experienced with gdb's internals but have used it before. Broadly i am interested in writing a decompiler (given a binary, create some readable HLL code), that let's you trace through code. I've used gdb to step through binaries without debug info, but as far as i've known (or tried), it has a limitation that it cant step out of a proc that it doesnt have src (or debug info to). So i cant step into libraries (am i correct?) So all i want to know is a broad idea about the complexity involved in writing a decompiler using some of gcc's C libs, that can parse the ELF binary (i think i've seen a lib for this parsing part in gcc) and generate dis-assembly that can be traced freely. (Ofcourse the ELF binary has to assumed to contain no debug info). Thanks a lot for sparing your time, -Prasanna