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Gotoless Structuring

Introduction

Gotoless structuring is a type of structuring that ignores some compiler patterns to make code that contains no gotos1. According to this work, these gotos are signs of unstructured code which is bad for readability12.

The most famous of these works, and the founder of the area, is the DREAM decompiler1. The DREAM decompiler used reaching conditions on statements to condense and reduce decompilation.

The followup to this work, which is a hybrid of gotoless and schema-based methods, is the rev.ng2 decompiler. They used a method called "Combing", which duplicated nodes in the original graph to get rid of unstructured regions.

  1. Yakdan, Khaled, et al. "No More Gotos: Decompilation Using Pattern-Independent Control-Flow Structuring and Semantic-Preserving Transformations." NDSS. 2015. ↩↩↩

  2. Gussoni, Andrea, et al. "A comb for decompiled c code." Proceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 2020. ↩↩