?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond.
˙˙ https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=73639
"I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully
decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary.
My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal
from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal
code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it
to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection."
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I doubt this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Lynn
On 10/14/2026 12:18 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond.
˙˙ https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=73639
"I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully
decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary.
My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal
from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal
code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it
to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection."
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Lynn
Yeah, that one boggles the mind. Why transpile from Pascal to Rust?
I just don't see anything, not even this, as a /victory/ over closed
source. Nor have I seen the promised "software quality" in open source.
I won't read the whole article now, so I may have more to say on this
subject at a later date.
Best wishes, and happy Pascal coding!
On 10/14/2026 12:18 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond. https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=73639
"I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary.
My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal
from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal
code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it
to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection."
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler. Why do I doubt this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Lynn
Yeah, that one boggles the mind. Why transpile from Pascal to Rust?
I just don't see anything, not even this, as a /victory/ over closed
source. Nor have I seen the promised "software quality" in open source.
I won't read the whole article now, so I may have more to say on this
subject at a later date.
Best wishes, and happy Pascal coding!
?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond.
˙˙ https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=73639
"I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully
decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary.
My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal
from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal
code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it
to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection."
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I doubt this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Wake me when they can move FOTRAN IV programs to Rust.And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?Yeah, that one boggles the mind. Why transpile from Pascal to Rust?
Lynn
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.
Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler. Why do I doubt >this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> spake the secret code <11amvre$15far$1@dont-email.me> thusly:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.
It's been around for decades. It's called Ida Pro. The NSA published
an open source one called Ghidra. It's actually not hard to recognize
the output of a particular compiler and reverse engineer stack frames, arguments, etc.
What the LLM brings to the picture is speculating meaningful
datatypes, names, patterns, etc., on top of the mechanical
decompilation.
Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
Maybe because you don't have experience with existing reverse
compilers (try Ghidra, since it's free) and LLMs?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
It's not like he converted to Prolog. Mapping from one procedurally
oriented block structured language to another is not particularly
difficult.
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler. Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
Because decompiling some languages isn't that hard. Humans can do it pretty well, although it's harder for machines. It helps a lot if you have a symbol table (which it sounds like they did in the example ESR cites).
Now... that said... I wouldn't trust anything ESR ever says and I would not hold him up as an authority.
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
That seems like a step down, doesn't it?
--scott
In article <11ar89j$2mdpm$2@dont-email.me>,
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/15/2026 9:56 AM, Richard wrote:
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> spake the secret code
<11amvre$15far$1@dont-email.me> thusly:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.
It's been around for decades. It's called Ida Pro. The NSA published
an open source one called Ghidra. It's actually not hard to recognize
the output of a particular compiler and reverse engineer stack frames,
arguments, etc.
What the LLM brings to the picture is speculating meaningful
datatypes, names, patterns, etc., on top of the mechanical
decompilation.
Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
Maybe because you don't have experience with existing reverse
compilers (try Ghidra, since it's free) and LLMs?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
It's not like he converted to Prolog. Mapping from one procedurally
oriented block structured language to another is not particularly
difficult.
I tried Ida Pro several years ago. It was crap.
I have never tried Ghidra. Maybe someday.
Turbo Pascal was kind of amazing. Lightning fast compile on 8086, and
ran on oddball hardware like the DEC Rainbow.
On 10/15/2026 10:05 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
Lynn McGuire˙ <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I doubt >>> this even though ESR says otherwise?
Because decompiling some languages isn't that hard.˙ Humans can do it
pretty
well, although it's harder for machines.˙ It helps a lot if you have a
symbol
table (which it sounds like they did in the example ESR cites).
Now... that said... I wouldn't trust anything ESR ever says and I
would not
hold him up as an authority.
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
That seems like a step down, doesn't it?
--scott
Yes on the step down to Rust.˙ I wrote a lot of Turbo Pascal code back
in the 1980s but I have to admit that I am a C++ fanboi through and
through.˙ And at my age, it will hard to change my mind on that unless
you are writing embedded code.
I have translated over 200,000 lines of Fortran 66/77 code to C++ this
year so far.˙ Trying to get to 300,000 lines of Fortran 66/77 code
before the end of the year.
Lynn
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