C Programming Language

The C programming language is the oldest system programming language that is still widely used today. Native code decompilers usually produce C code as a result. There are no complex language-specific artifacts. Executables are usually dynamically linked with the libc and they are rather small.

C++ Programming Language

The C++ programming language can be seen as a more advanced version of C with added features. It's a complex, object-oriented language, involving:

• Classes, constructors/destructors
• Virtual functions
• Generic programming
• Exception handling
• Anonymous functions (lambdas) and closures
• etc.

Program written in C++ are usually dynamically linked with the libc++ library. Compared to C, some noise is present in the final executable.

Rust Programming Language

Rust is a modern system programming language that is safer than C/C++ but performs similarly.

It also has several language-specific features, such as:

• Automatic memory allocation and deallocation
• Runtime bound checks
• Dynamic trait objects
• Anonymous functions (lambdas) and closures
• Generic programming
• etc.

Rust executables are dynamically linked with libc, but statically linked with the Rust runtime. Compared to C, Rust executables are much noisier.

Go Programming Language

The Go programming language is supported by Google and is mainly used for backend programming.

It comes with the following features:

• Garbage collector
• Concurrency deeply rooted in the language (goroutines)
• etc.

Go executables are linked statically and are quite noisy. Go has its own internal representation of strings and is not especially well supported by reverse engineering tools. However, tooling is emerging; examples include the Go Reverse Engineering Toolkit.

In the next episode, I’ll discuss topics related to reverse engineering interpreted languages. Stay tuned!

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