Q: Why there's need for yet another decompiler, especillay a crippled one?
A: Sad truth that most decompilers out there are crippled. Many aren't
able to decompile trivial constructs, others can't decompile more advanced,
those which seemingly can deal with them, are crippled by supporting only
the boring architectures and OSes. And almost every written in such way that
tweaking it or adding a new architecture is complicated. Decompiler is a
tool for reverse engineering, but ironically, if you want to use a
typical decompiler productively or make it suit your needs, first you
will need to reverse-engineer the decompiler itself.

How ScratchABlock is different?

The central part of a decompiler (and any program transformation framework)
is Intermediate Representation (IR). A decompiler should work on IR, and
should take it as input, and conversion of particular architecture's
assembler to this IR should be well decoupled from a decompiler, or
otherwise it takes extraordinary effort to add support for another
architecture (which in turn limits userbase of a decompiler).

Decompilation is complex task, so there should be easy insight into the
process. This means that IR used by a decompiler should be human-friendly,
for example use a syntax familiar to programmers, map as directly as
possible to a typical machine assembler, etc.

The requirements above should be quite obvious on their own. If not, they
can be learnt from the books on the matter, e.g.:

"The compiler writer also needs mechanisms that let humans examine the IR
program easily and directly. Self-interest should ensure that compiler
writers pay heed to this last point."

(Keith Cooper, Linda Torczon, "Engineering a Compiler")

However, decompiler projects, including OpenSource ones, routinely violate
these requirements: they are tightly coupled with specific machine
architectures, don't allow to feed IR in, and oftentimes don't expose or
document it to user at all.

ScratchABlock is an attempt to say "no" to such practices and develop a
decompilation framework based on the requirements above. Note that
ScratchABlock can be considered learning/research project, and beyond
good intentions and criticism of other projects, may not offer too much
to a casual user - currently, or possibly at all. It can certainly be
criticised in many aspects too.