radare2/TODO.decompiler

Decompiler for radare2 trackline
================================

Objectives
==========
- Name local variables argments and global vars (Cv ...)
- Common construct detection (if/switch/for/while/do)
- Enum detection/support (load from .h ?) #define /enum parse only
- Detect sign of variables (depending on the conditionals used)
- Change operations to ease reading ('\n' instead of 0xa.. sub<->add)
- Detect and propagate variable types
- Symbol recognition

Core (RAnal, RMeta, RBin, ...)
==============================
* Language: C
* Analyze opcodes
* Detect numeric sign
* Detect data type and size by analyzing the accesses
* Analyze conditionals (if () goto .., labels, ...)
* Support push+ret constructions
* Analyze function calls (fast/slowcall, parameters, data types, return values..)
* Define data types (as 'pm' structs (memory format string))
* Analyze common constructions

Plugin (Radare.Decompiler class)
================================
* Language: Vala
* Using visitor paradigm
* Bidirectional sync methods for core
  - Caches data and code from the core
  - Comments must be syncronized too
* Independent structure compared to core
* Optimize sequences of opcodes
* Optimize AST (remove unaccessible code, join nodes, ...)
* Polimorph operations to simplify reading (shl eax, 1 => eax *= 2)
* Remove stack-related operations
* Resolve and propagate data types
* Parse .h files in order to import function signatures, defines, enums, ..
* Support to decompile single function or full program
* Each node must have a to_string() method to serialize
* Indent resulting code
* Remove trash code

UI (Gtk+)
=========
* Language: Vala
* Implemented as a Gtk.Widget
* Walk along the decompiled program code
  - change variable names (read/write value)
  - go xrefs

Future
======
* Floating point support
* Support high-level language constructions (objective-C, gobject, c++, ...)

External linkz
==============
* http://www.pivotaltracker.com/


-------------8<-------------------------------------------- -- - -   - -  -
+-------------------+
| Plugin API design |
+-------------------+

public class RadareDecompiler.AST { }
public class RadareDecompiler.Node { }
public class RadareDecompiler.Function { }
public class RadareDecompiler.Variable { }
public class RadareDecompiler.Constant { }
public class RadareDecompiler.Conditional { }
public class RadareDecompiler.Enum { }

public class Radare.Decompiler {
	public class Decompiler(RCore core) {
		...
	}
	public void sync(bool write) { ... }
}