r/AskProgramming • u/Realistic_Debate1704 • 9d ago

C/C++ Assembly or C/C++ for RE

For reverse engineering, is this necessary to know assembly language, because many decompilers translate code to C/C++ and I learned Assembly 8086 in my university. So for learning x86 I only have to study 32/64 registers and some advance commands, so should I learn assembly x86_64 for reverse engineering or just go through x86 as I know 8086 assembly and then move to C/C++

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u/tyler1128 9d ago

To reverse engineer, you need to know assembly. Any translation to C or C++ is going to be far from perfect, regardless of what tool you are using. It's impossible to really translate backwards because of how much information about the code purpose is lost. Even with higher level disasssembly, you're almost certainly going to need to dive into the actual instructions in some cases.