Reko (Swedish: "decent, obliging") is a C# project containing a decompiler for machine code binaries. This project is freely available under the GNU General Public License.
The project consists of front ends, core decompiler engine, and back ends to help it achieve its goals. A command-line, a Windows GUI, and a ASP.NET front end exist at the time of writing. The decompiler engine receives inputs from the front ends in the form of either individual executable files or decompiler project files. Reko project files contain additional information about a binary file, helpful to the decompilation process or for formatting the output. The decompiler engine then proceeds to analyze the input binary.
Please note that many software licenses prohibit decompilation or other reverse engineering of their machine code binaries. Use this decompiler only if you have legal rights to decompiler the binary (for instance if the binary is your own.)
To build reko, start by cloning https://github.com/uxmal/reko. You
can use an IDE or the command line to build the solution file
Reko-decompiler.sln. If you are an IDE user, use Visual
Studio 2013 or later, or MonoDevelop version 5.10 or later. If you
wish to build using the command line, use the commands
msbuild Reko-decompiler.sln
on Windows machines and
xbuild Reko-decompiler.sln
on machine with the Mono toolchain. All external dependencies
needed to build are included in the external directory.
Note: some users have reported difficulties with certain Linux distributions that don't support the 4.0 CLR framework (see issue #251 for details). One workaround that has been identified is to specify the CLR target framework explicitly at the xbuild command line:
xbuild /p:TargetFrameworkVersion="v4.5" Reko-decompiler.sln
You may be able to work around the problem reported in issue #251 by downloading the appropriate Mono CLR binaries from git://github.com/mono/reference-assemblies.git
Note: please let us know if you still are not able to compile, so we can help you fix the issue.
You will receive warnings or errors when loading the solution in Visual Studio or MonoDevelop if you haven't installed the WiX toolset on your development machine. You can safely ignore the warnings; the WiX toolset is only used when making MSI installer packages, and isn't even supported in MonoDevelop. You will not need to build an installer if you're already able to compile the project: the build process copies all the necessary files into If you do want to build an MSI installer with the WiX toolchain, you can download it here: http://wixtoolset.org/releases/
The solution folder Drivers contains the executables that act
as user interfaces: the directory WindowsDecompiler contains
the GUI client for Windows users; MonoDecompiler contains the GUI
client for Mono users; CmdLine is a command line driver.
If you're interested in contributing code, see the road map for areas to explore. The Wiki has more information about the Reko project's internal workings.
See NEWS.md for the change log.