HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
lifting-bits
mcsema
C++2014–2025
lifting-bits / mcsema · Archived

mcsema

Framework for lifting x86, amd64, aarch64, sparc32, and sparc64 program binaries to LLVM bitcode

Languages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
18Distinct people
25Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Framework for lifting x86, amd64, aarch64, sparc32, and sparc64 program binaries to LLVM bitcode

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:58:02 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year25 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-08-11 19:25:13 UTC to 2025-01-04 22:22:33 UTC.

02462014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
dguido·Jul 6, 2018
> Can anyone from McSema comment on why it's moved from paid solutions for CFG recovery? Plainly, because radare's CFG recovery is not reliable enough for us to use. It's not a production quality tool when compared to IDA or Binary Ninja. CFG recovery is an extraordinarily complex problem and doing it right requires a team with commercial support behind them. Altruism simply does not get you far enough for the grind of developing effective CFG recovery. Similarly, McSema itself is not free either. We're being paid by the US Government. It requires a team of people with decades of experience in programming languages and compilers working together for years. We're lucky to be in this position, but it could have easily gone the other way. Not every project out there has a sponsor willing to make it free. The teams behind IDA and Binary Ninja
Read the rest
don't have some other, enormous business producing profits to support them (say, advertising). In order to spend the person-decades of time required to build these tools that our entire community relies on for our jobs, they need an income stream to work on them. > The support for radare is ... not even merged. I'm not aware of any pull requests for radare support. You're welcome to submit one and we'll consider it. However, we'll expect the author to continue supporting it as McSema grows since we can't use it for our projects (it's not reliable enough). I will note that we have an open PR for DynInst-based CFG recovery but we're still working with the author to review and approve it. https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema/pull/386
In Optimizing Lifted Bitcode with Dead Store Elimination
kodablah·Jun 22, 2018
The ModInverse and GCD improvements will be very welcome in a demo I just wrote for trustless card playing[0]. I'm beginning to wonder if there will become more value in "lifting" binaries to LLVM IR, applying all opts to them, and re-compiling them. McSema does this[1] albeit you have to setup IDA and what not. Has anyone applied this to Go programs and measured its benefits for their specific use cases? 0 - https://github.com/cretz/go-mental-poker 1 - https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema
In Performance patches in Go 1.11

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.