Binary Group
                              Centre for Software Maintenance
                              Department of Computer Science and
                              Electrical Engineering
                              The University of Queensland

July 1999

Dear respondant,

Please excuse this form letter, but we get a lot of email from
people asking us to decompile their legacy programs, or asking
for help with doing it themselves, using the dcc decompiler.
Unfortunately, dcc is really just a "proof of concept" program,
and is unable to decompile the vast majority of real world
programs.  dcc was developed for DOS programs and does not 
support Windows programs.  We have not been working on the dcc 
project for over 4 years. 

In particular, dcc is not now (and is unlikely to be in the near
future) capable of generating C++ code. Small programs that were
originally written in C++ might be successfully decompiled to
valid C code, but that's not what people usually want.

Also, dcc has a fundamental implementation design flaw with the way it 
allocates memory for various structures (nodes in the control flow graph,
structures re- presenting high level instructions, and the like).
The net effect of this is that even with a computer with lots of
memory, dcc is likely to crash when the size of the input program
(the binary file being decompiled) exceeds about 30Kb to maybe
50Kb. Obviously, this rules out the vast majority of real-world
programs.

It is possible that dedicated people in the internet community
might be able to correct the memory allocation problem (it's not
a simple task, due to the way that dcc was written. Remember,
this was a thesis project, not a commercial undertaking). The dcc
home page is:

  http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~cristina/dcc.html

We cannot help you with any questions about dcc, we just do 
not have the time. 

                                Yours sincerely,
                                The Binary Group.