QuantumG's Blog

I had an major issue where the Boehm garbage collector was crashing and spitting errors because of my use of Qt4's QThread class. The problem was simple enough, Qt4 calls pthread_create when it should be calling GC_pthread_create. I could have solved this problem by modifying qthread_private.cpp to do this, but that would mean distributing a modified Qt4, which is just silly for such a small change. So after much annoyance, I managed to come up with a solution that, although not pretty, seems to work. As such, there will be a Linux version of the GUI available to download when I make binary packages sometime in the next week.

I did some fixes to the html output option in the various print() functions of Boomerang today. This is all so I can display RTL as pretty as possible. I'm thinking that hovering the mouse over a RefExp should highlight the line that is referenced by it. That's my first goal, and then I'll work on a context menu. All this is possible because I can hide pointers in the html output which refer back to the intermediate representation. Qt4 has the advantage that good html display widgets are standard parts of the toolkit. What I don't intend to do is to allow freeform manipulation of the RTL. That would require an RTL parser, which I'm simply not in the mood to write, at least this month.

Quite a while ago I attempted to write a GUI for Boomerang. In fact, I've done this a couple of times. The stalling point has always been: what good is a GUI? Decompilers are supposed to be automatic. You should be able to give a decompiler an executable and trust it to spit out a C file that meets some definition of program equivalence with that executable. So if the decompiler works perfectly, what is there for the user to do? Surely anything they can offer will be more productively applied to the output, and for that they can just use standard source code manipulation tools. Well, there's two problems with this line of thinking. First, there's the sad fact that no decompiler is perfect. In fact, the state of the art is far, far, from adequate, let alone perfect. Secondly, standard source code manipulation tools are woefully underpowered for even the most simplest tasks of traditional reverse engineering (where traditional means "starting from source code...