David Foster

decomp4

decomp4 is a full-featured Java decompiler (what's this?) that I developed over a period of three years between high school and college. This is the largest codebase that I have written from scratch, consisting of over 50,000 lines of code.

This project really solidified my understanding of the Java language. Not only did I end up reading the Java Language Specification and Java Virtual Machine Specification from cover to cover, I also had to learn several new practices to deal with a such a large codebase.

As of February 19, 2005, decomp4 is able to successfully decompile 99.68% of the 6949 classes in the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition v1.4.1.


Features

Features include:
  • support for all simple Java language constructs
  • support for synchronized blocks
  • support for try-catch-finally blocks
  • advanced type inference
  • advanced control flow analysis
Notable non-supported constructs (mostly from Java 1.5+) include:
  • nested classes
  • generics
  • auto-boxing/unboxing
  • enhanced for loops
  • enum and annotation types
  • annotations

Versions

Previous major versions of this project include:
  • decomp3 (~44,000 LOC)
  • decomp2 (~19,000 LOC)
  • decomp (a throwaway prototype)

Papers

Download How can Java .class files be decompiled?
This paper was submitted to the Georgia Science and Engineering Fair (GSEF) in 2004.
Download Decompiling Java, Part II: Control Flow
This paper was submitted to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in 2005.