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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, 12:45:45 PM 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

1 sources
carom·Jan 4, 2025
Most decompilers do not strive for recompilability. [1] I believe there are (or were) some academic projects that aimed for recompilation as a core feature, but it is a hard problem. On the commercial side, IDA / HexRays [2] is very strong for C-like decompilation. If you're looking at Go, Rust, or even C++ it is going to be a little bit more messy. As other commenters have said, you'll work function-by-function and it is expensive, though the free version does have decompilation (F5) for x86 and x64 (IIRC). Binary Ninja [3] (no affiliation) is the coolest IMO, they have multiple intermediate representations they lift the assembly through. So you get like assembly -> low level IL -> medium level IL -> high level IL. There are also SSA forms (static single assignment) that can aid in programmatic analyses. The high level IL is very readabl
Read the rest
e but makes no effort to be compilable as a programming language. That being said, Binary Ninja has implemented different "views" on the HLIL so you can show it as pseudo-C, Rust, etc. There is a free online version and the commercial version is cheaper than IDA but still expensive. Good Python API, good UI. Ghidra [4] is the RE framework released by NSA. It is free and open source. It supports a ton of niche architectures. This is what most people use. I think the UI is awful, personally. It has a decompiler, the results are OK. They have an intermediate representation (P-Code) and plugins are in Java (since it is written in Java). I haven't worked much with it. Most online decompilations you see for old games are likely using Ghidra, some might be using IDA. This is largely a manual process of doing a function at a time and building up the mental map of the program and how things interact. Also worth mentioning are lifters. There were a few projects that aimed to lift assembly to LLVM IR (compiler framework's intermediate representation), with the idea being that then all your analyses could be written over LLVM IR as a lingua franca. Since it is in LLVM IR, it would be also recompilable and retargetable. [5][6] 1. https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2603/... 2. https://hex-rays.com/ida-free 3. https://binary.ninja/free/ 4. https://ghidra-sre.org/ 5. https://github.com/avast/retdec 6. https://github.com/lifting-bits/mcsema
In Ask HN: How are you using LLMs for traversing decompiler output?

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