Modular Decompilation of Low-Level Code by Partial Evaluation

Decompiling low-level code to a high-level intermediate representation facilitates the development of analyzers, model checkers, etc. which reason about properties of the low-level code (e.g., bytecode, .NET). Interpretive decompilation consists in partially evaluating an interpreter for the low-level language (written in the high-level language) w.r.t. the code to be decompiled. There have been proofs-of-concept that interpretive decompilation is feasible, butt here remain important open issues when it comes to decompile a real language: does the approach scale up? is the quality of decompiled programs comparable to that obtained by ad-hoc decompilers? do decompiled programs preserve the structure of the original programs?  This paper addresses these issues by presenting, to the best of our knowledge, the first modular scheme to enable interpretive decompilation of low-level code to a high-level representation, namely, we decompile bytecode into Prolog. We introduce two notions of optimality. The first one requires that each method/block is decompiled just once. The second one requires that each program point is traversed at most once during decompilation. We demonstrate the impact of our modular approach and optimality issues on a series of realistic benchmarks.  Decompilation times and decompiled program sizes are linear with the size of the input bytecode program. This demostrates empirically the scalability of modular decompilation of low-level code by partial evaluation.