Boomerang decompiler / News: Recent posts

After some five years of work on the Boomerang machine code decompiler, the two main developers (QuantumG and Mike Van Emmerik) are withdrawing from further development.

The reason is that they have both joined a company which owns technology that is sufficiently similar to that of Boomerang that there is a conflict of interest.

We both have a great fondness for the Boomerang project, and will probably watch it with interest and answer emails where time permits and where answering would not conflict with our new employer's interests. So we can answer questions such as "How does Boomerang do X?" but not "How could Boomerang do Y?" (or "do Z better").... read more

Six months have passed since the last alpha Boomerang release. Since then significant stability and functionality changes have been made. A new Qt4 based GUI has been developed which has spearheaded this new focus on stability and usability.

This time there are two packages available, Linux and Windows, both of which contain binaries for the command line and gui tools.

This is still an alpha release, which means that you should not expect to do any serious work with Boomerang without hacking on the source code yourself. The only place to get source code is from CVS and using the head of the tree is recommended.... read more

It's been almost 18 months since the last binary release. There are now two versions for Linux, one for systems with libstdc++.so.5, and another for those with libstdc++.so.6. Make sure you download the right one for your system.

There is also a console release for Windows, built with MinGW.

Machine code decompilation is still in its infancy, and Boomerang is still not usable on large, real-world binary files. A number of things have improved incrementally, but there is still a long way to go.... read more

Thanks to a generous donation from a loyal supporter of Boomerang we're able to offer a fun challenge to C++ developers. We're offering a cash prize (transfered to your paypal account) of $40 to the person who fixes the most bugs by the 20th of December 2004. The two admins of the project have disqualified themselves :) We classify something as a bug if it is something that causes: a segfault, an infinite loop, blatantly incorrect output, blatantly poor output. The bug must be found in the latest CVS version of Boomerang and be not a duplicate fix of some other bug (only the first applicant to submit the same bug will be counted.) All applicants must conform with our patch submission process (see http://boomerang.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html#Contribute\) and have their patches in by the due date. See the competition web page at http://boomerang.sourceforge.net/competition.html\) for more details.

The open source decompiler Boomerang has reached an alpha level usability. As such we have made the first binary file release. This release is for developers and experimenters only. If you're wanting to do real work with Boomerang you're not going to have a very fun time, but if you're interested in decompilation and have some experience with alpha grade software, please download the release and report any and all bugs you may find.

On the 6th of August, 2003, Boomerang became capable of decompiling the wily "fibo-O4" test program (which prints the result of the fibonacci function). There is nothing all that special about this test program; it's only about 20 lines of C, though it has recursion. A combinbation of factors has prevented this program from being successfully decompiled, until the sixth. Who knows? Perhaps that day will go down in history...... read more

Now that UQBT has been released, we can release the source code that we have been working on for the last few weeks that is based on that code.

See the web page for details (http://boomerang.sourceforge.net) on what the code can and (more to the point) can't do, what the required tools are, etc. This project is just starting; people looking for quick fixes won't find what they want.

- Mike

Mike Van Emmerik is in the process of getting a decoder into place. In CVS are some portions of the intermediate representation and an initial hack at a gui using the wxWindows toolkit.