TL;DR: Don't judge a programmer by his decompiled code.
So I don't know much about RE, and I've only done a little work in school with C#, but some of this *has* to be the result of you only being able to look at the code after it was compiled and then decompiled, right? Like, the compiler could make optimizations that are less readable, right? For my own sanity I just need to know a human didn't actually write that code.
I can't speak for C#/CLR, but in the world of C/assembly that's exactly what happens. For instance, these two snippets of code...
if (a && b)
{
do_stuff();
}
rest_of_program();if (a)
{
if (b)
{
do_stuff();
}
}
rest_of_program();...would be indistinguishable when compiled to machine code; i.e., both of them would become something like this (very roughly speaking):
compare a, 0;
jmp_if_eq after_if;
compare b, 0;
jmp_if_eq after_if;
call do_stuff;
after_if:
call rest_of_program;A decompiler has to look at that sequence of instructions and try to figure out which logic structures would produce such a sequence, and the result is usually incorrect (i.e., it doesn't match the structure that the C programmer originally wrote).
I have absolutely zero sympathy for MF and their piece of junk software, but criticizing their craftsmanship based this reverse-engineered chunk of code is misguided. We have plenty of
legitimate reasons to criticize their craftsmanship, after all.
