markjprice
commented
10 months ago The sentence is within the section "No, you cannot technically prevent decompilation" and the sentence describes one of the reasons why. The sentence continues the theme from the preceding paragraph, "All compiled applications contain instructions to the platform, operating system, and hardware on which it runs [and therefore a VM as described in the sentence]. Those instructions must be functionally the same as the original source code but are just harder for a human to read. Those instructions must be readable to execute your code; they therefore must be readable to be decompiled. If you were to protect your code from decompilation using some custom technique, then you would also prevent your code from running!"
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Chapter: 7 Page Number: 339 Section Title: No, you cannot technically prevent decompilation Step Number: Problem to fix: The last sentence on the page is very much out of place. There are no connecting thoughts or topics. It's just in there and doesn't fit. Suggested solution: Remove the sentence, "Virtual machines simulate hardware and so can capture all interaction between your running application and the software and hardware that it thinks it is running on." Other useful information e.g. OS, coding tools, and so on: