this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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No, it is wrong. Machine code is not source code.
And even if you had the source code it may not necessarily qualify as open source.
well assembly is technically "source code" and can be 1:1 translated to and from binary, excluding "syntactic sugar" stuff like macros and labels added on top.
But those things you're excluding are the most important parts of the source code...
By excluded he means macro assemblers which in my mind do qualify as an actual langauge as they have more complicated syntax than instruction arg1, arg2 ...
The code is produced by the compiler but they are not the original source. To qualify as source code it needs to be in the original language it was written in and a one for one copy. Calling compiler produced assembly source code is wrong as it isn't what the author wrote and their could be many versions of it depending on architecture.
Never heard of a decompiler I see.
A decompiler doesnt give you access to the comments, variable names, which is an important part of every source code
Meanwhile, AI is having a heyday with it...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.09029
What's cool is that you can interpret the var names yourself and rename them whatever you want.
But it is extremely time-consuming. Open source code makes it transparent and easy to read, that's what it is about: transparency
A decompiler won't give you the source code. Just some code that might not even necessarily work when compiled back.
From the point of view of the decompiler machine code is indeed the source code though
And? Decompilers aren't for noobs. So what if it gives you variable and function names like A000, A001, etc?
It can still lead a seasoned programmer where to go in the raw machine code to mod some things.
You're actually chatting with a hacker that made No-CD hacks.
Try converting from English to Japanese and back to English.
xor ax, axA fancy way to say do nothing is not the same as translating back and forth. Example: Show me the intermediate translation.
Also we live in a 64bit world now old man
Also that instruction does not do nothing, it resets the CPU register to zero without having to access RAM. Far from a NOP instruction.
You're right.
xor rax, raxStill not the actual source code, bucko.
No, it's actually better when you can read the machine code.
Most folks don't care to recompile the whole thing when all they wanna do is bypass the activation and tracker shit.
Having access to the source code actually makes reading machine code easier, so you're also wrong on this entirely different thing you're going on about.
You've clearly never used a disassembler such as HIEW have you? You get the entire breakdown of the assembly code.
I disassemble binaries daily for work. It's still not the same as source code.
I didn't say it was. I just said loosely what the OG meme said, if you know how to read assembly, you know how to read (and write) what some of the code does.
I never said disassembly or decompiling was easier in any way. I'll agree with you on that, it's way more difficult.
Back to the point of the meme though, if you can read assembly, you can read it all.
You've never actually compared source code to its compiled output, have you.
I've written drivers in 65 bytes of code. I don't tend to use high level languages that hide what's going on behind the scenes.