[Openmcl-devel] CCL images, consumer apps, and piracy

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 10 Apr 2011, at 04:55, Brandon Van Every wrote:

> It is trivially easy to decompile a bytecoded language such as Java or
> C#.


Is this true?  I'm sure it's easy to essentially *disassemble* the bytecode, in the same way it's possible to disassemble native code, and for the JVM say, that disassembly might take the form of Java source, but I wonder how useful such disassembly is: surely the hallmark of a decent compiler is that the source->object mapping is very far from being 1-1?  Certainly my, now fairly distant, experience of looking at disassembly from serious (native code) compilers was that it just was not that helpful because so much stuff was optimised away.

In the case of the JVM how would such decompilation know whether the source language was Java or, say, Clojure, or one of the other languages which target the JVM (I forget the name of the CL implementation - is it Armed Bear?).

--tim