History

Someday I found guavad, a disassembler for java byte code (it does similar things like javap -c). I used it on a class file, and found that it was possible to reconstruct the original java code. First I did it by hand on some small routines, but I soon realized that it was a rather stupid task. So I wrote a small perl script that did this process automatically. At the end of the next day I had my first working decompiler.

Now while the perl script is working, it is not easy to use. You have to decompile the code first with a disassembler, cut out the code of a single method, and run the perl script on it. I decided to get the bytecode directly out of the class files and do this all automatically. I decided to write it in java now, because it suited best.

Just for the records: the java code is now more than 50 times bigger than the original perl script and is still growing.