Comment

Comment by lifthrasiir

JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy. It would be of course tedious enough to be manually done in general, but transformations themselves are fairly limited so it is possible to read them only with some notes to track mangled identifiers.

A more general unminification or unobfuscation still seems to be an open problem. I wrote handful of programs that are intentionally obfuscated in the past and ChatGPT couldn't understand them even at the surface level in my experience. For example, a gist for my 160-byte-long Brainfuck interpreter in C had some comment trying to use GPT-4 to explain the code [1], but the "clarified version" bore zero similarity with the original code...

[1] https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/596667#gistcomment-47512...

parent lifthrasiir 2 years ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton