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2026 · Preprint

The Evolution of Binary Decompilation in the Modern Era: A Taxonomy, Literature Review, and Future Perspectives

Omar Abusabha; Sungjae Hwang

This survey maps traditional, dynamic, matching and neural decompilation approaches, then organizes type recovery, control-flow restructuring, naming and refinement tasks alongside evaluation metrics and benchmark choices. An accompanying repository provides the reviewed literature list.

Scope and limitations

The search ends in December 2025 and focuses on peer-reviewed studies of C-origin binaries. Selection and categorization involve manual judgment. Reported tool capabilities reflect surveyed publications, not necessarily current implementations. It is a literature synthesis, not a newly reproduced cross-tool performance benchmark or a complete account of 2026 preprints.

Why it fits this collection

Provides a structured map for finding decompilation techniques, benchmarks and the assumptions behind their evaluation.

Publication and review details

Venue
arXiv
Status
Preprint
Publication / posting date
August 25, 2026
Date source
First arXiv submission date; no separate proceedings or journal publication was verified.
First arXiv submission
August 25, 2026
arXiv
2608.24955
Reviewed arXiv version
v1

The manuscript says under review at ACM Computing Surveys; this is not treated as acceptance or journal publication. The paper is CC BY 4.0. The pinned repository has a README and 72-row bibliography CSV, not a decompiler implementation; no separate repository license was established. No cited tools were executed.

Sources reviewed

Source review only; experiments were not rerun for this collection. Cite the original authors using the linked paper or BibTeX.

Primary sources

  1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24955v1
  2. https://arxiv.org/html/2608.24955v1
  3. https://lion10.github.io/
  4. README.md GitHub · lion10/csur2026_binary_decompilation · Revision e733872
  5. papers.csv GitHub · lion10/csur2026_binary_decompilation · Revision e733872
  6. https://api.github.com/repos/lion10/csur2026_binary_decompilation/git/trees/6895d55f00b8520ec345d0380c0efa65969462dc