This project has history of over 18 years spanning back to Python 1.5
There have been a number of people who have worked on this. I am awed by the amount of work, number of people who have contributed to this, and the cleverness in the code.
The below is an annotated history from talking to participants involved and my reading of the code and sources cited.
In 1998, John Aycock first wrote a grammar parser in Python, eventually called SPARK, that was usable inside a Python program. This code was described in the 7th International Python Conference. That paper doesn't talk about decompilation, nor did John have that in mind at that time. It does mention that a full parser for Python (rather than the simple languages in the paper) was being considered.
This contains a of people acknowledged in developing SPARK. What's amazing about this code is that it is reasonably fast and has survived up to Python 3 with relatively little change. This work was done in conjunction with his Ph.D Thesis. This was finished around 2001. In working on his thesis, John realized SPARK could be used to deparse Python bytecode. In the fall of 1999, he started writing the Python program, "decompyle", to do this.
To help with control structure deparsing the instruction sequence was augmented with pseudo instruction COME_FROM. This code introduced another clever idea: using table-driven semantics routines, using format specifiers.
The last mention of a release of SPARK from John is around 2002. As released, although the Earley Algorithm parser was in good shape, this code was woefully lacking as serious Python deparser.
In the fall of 2000, Hartmut Goebel took over maintaining the code. The first subsequent public release announcement that I can find is "decompyle - A byte-code-decompiler version 2.2 beta 1".
From the CHANGES file found in the tarball for that release, it appears that Hartmut did most of the work to get this code to accept the full Python language. He added precedence to the table specifiers, support for multiple versions of Python, the pretty-printing of docstrings, lists, and hashes. He also wrote test and verification routines of deparsed bytecode, and used this in an extensive set of tests that he also wrote. He says he could verify against the entire Python library. However I have subsequently found small and relatively obscure bugs in the decompilation code.
decompyle2.2 was packaged for Debian (sarge) by Ben Burton around 2002. As it worked on Python 2.2 only long after Python 2.3 and 2.4 were in widespread use, it was removed.
Crazy Compilers offers a byte-code decompiler service for versions of Python up to 2.6. As someone who worked in compilers, it is tough to make a living by working on compilers. (For example, based on John Aycock's recent papers it doesn't look like he's done anything compiler-wise since SPARK). So I hope people will use the crazy-compilers service. I wish them the success that his good work deserves.
Dan Pascu did a bit of work from late 2004 to early 2006 to get this code to handle first Python 2.3 and then 2.4 bytecodes. Because of jump optimization introduced in the CPython bytecode compiler at that time, various JUMP instructions were classified to assist parsing For example, due to the way that code generation and line number table work, jump instructions to an earlier offset must be looping jumps, such as those found in a "continue" statement; "COME FROM" instructions were reintroduced. See RELEASE-2.4-CHANGELOG.txt for more details here. There wasn't a public release of RELEASE-2.4 and bytecodes other than Python 2.4 weren't supported. Dan says the Python 2.3 version could verify the entire Python library. But given subsequent bugs found like simply recognizing complex-number constants in bytecode, decompilation wasn't perfect.
Next we get to "uncompyle" and PyPI and the era of public version control. (Dan's code although not public used darcs for version control.)
In contrast to decompyle, uncompyle at least in its final versions, runs only on Python 2.7. However it accepts bytecode back to Python 2.5. Thomas Grainger is the package owner of this, although Hartmut is still listed as the author.
The project exists not only on github but also on bitbucket and later the defunct google code. The git/svn history goes back to 2009. Somewhere in there the name was changed from "decompyle" to "unpyc" by Keknehv, and then to "uncompyle" by Guenther Starnberger.
The name Thomas Grainger isn't found in (m)any of the commits in the several years of active development. First Keknehv worked on this up to Python 2.5 or so while acceping Python bytecode back to 2.0 or so. Then hamled made a few commits earler on, while Eike Siewertsen made a few commits later on. But mostly wibiti, and Guenther Starnberger got the code to where uncompyle2 was around 2012.
While John Aycock and Hartmut Goebel were well versed in compiler technology, those that have come afterwards don't seem to have been as facile in it. Furthermore, documentation or guidance on how the decompiler code worked, comparison to a conventional compiler pipeline, how to add new constructs, or debug grammars was weak. Some of the grammar tracing and error reporting was a bit weak as well.
Given this, perhaps it is not surprising that subsequent changes tended to shy away from using the built-in compiler technology mechanisms and addressed problems and extensions by some other means.
Specifically, in uncompyle, decompilation of python bytecode 2.5 &
2.6 is done by transforming the byte code into a pseudo-2.7 Python
bytecode and is based on code from Eloi Vanderbeken. A bit of this
could have been easily added by modifying grammar rules.
This project, uncompyle6, abandons that approach for various
reasons. Having a grammar per Python version is much cleaner and it
scales indefinitely. That said, we don't have entire copies of the
grammar, but work off of differences from some neighboring version.
Should there be a desire to rebase or start a new base version to work off of, say for some future Python version, that can be done by dumping a grammar for a specific version after it has been loaded incrementally. You can get a full dump of the grammar by profiling the grammar on a large body of Python source code.
Another problem with pseudo-2.7 bytecode is that that we need offsets in fragment deparsing to be exactly the same as the bytecode; the transformation process can remove instructions. Adding instructions with psuedo offsets is however okay.
Uncompyle6 however owes its existence to the fork of uncompyle2 by
Myst herie (Mysterie) whose first commit picks up at
2012. I chose this since it seemed to have been at that time the most
actively, if briefly, worked on. Also starting around 2012 is Dark
Fenx's uncompyle3 which I used for inspiration for Python3 support.
I started working on this late 2015, mostly to add fragment support. In that, I decided to make this runnable on Python 3.2+ and Python 2.6+ while, handling Python bytecodes from Python versions 2.5+ and 3.2+. In doing so, it has been expedient to separate this into three projects:
- marshaling/unmarshaling, bytecode loading and disassembly (xdis),
- parsing and tree building (spark_parser),
- this project - grammar and semantic actions for decompiling (uncompyle6).
Over the many years, code styles and Python features have changed. However brilliant the code was and still is, it hasn't really had a single public active maintainer. And there have been many forks of the code. I have spent a great deal of time trying to organize and modularize the code so that it can handle more Python versions more gracefully (with still only moderate success).
That it has been in need of an overhaul has been recognized by the Hartmut a decade an a half ago:
decompyle/uncompile__init__.py
NB. This is not a masterpiece of software, but became more like a hack.
Probably a complete rewrite would be sensefull. hG/2000-12-27
This project deparses using an Earley-algorithm parse with lots of massaging of tokens and the grammar in the scanner phase. Earley-algorithm parsers are context free and tend to be linear if the grammar is LR or left recursive. There is a technique for improving LL right recursion, but our parser doesn't have that yet.
Another approach to decompiling, and one that doesn't use grammars is to do something like simulate execution symbolically and build expression trees off of stack results. Control flow in that approach still needs to be handled somewhat ad hoc. The two important projects that work this way are unpyc3 and most especially pycdc The latter project is largely by Michael Hansen and Darryl Pogue. If they supported getting source-code fragments, did a better job in supporting Python more fully, and had a way I could call it from Python, I'd probably would have ditched this and used that. The code runs blindingly fast and spans all versions of Python, although more recently Python 3 support has been lagging. The code is impressive for its smallness given that it covers many versions of Python. However, I think it has reached a scalability issue, same as all the other efforts. To handle Python versions more accurately, I think that code base will need to have a lot more code specially which specializes for Python versions. And then it will run into a modularity problem.
Tests for the project have been, or are being, culled from all of the projects mentioned. Quite a few have been added to improve grammar coverage and to address the numerous bugs that have been encountered.
If you think, as I am sure will happen in the future, "hey, I can just write a decompiler from scratch and not have to deal with all all of the complexity here", think again. What is likely to happen is that you'll get at best a 90% solution working for a single Python release that will be obsolete in about a year, and more obsolete each subsequent year. Writing a decompiler for Python gets harder as it Python progresses, so writing one for Python 3.7 isn't as easy as it was for Python 2.2. That said, if you still feel you want to write a single version decompiler, look at the test cases in this project and talk to me. I may have some ideas.
For a little bit of the history of changes to the Earley-algorithm parser, see the file NEW-FEATURES.rst in the python-spark github repository.
NB. If you find mistakes, want corrections, or want your name added (or removed), please contact me.