Capstone vs RetDec
GitHub Stats
About Capstone
Capstone is a lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture disassembly framework. It provides a clean, simple API to disassemble binary code into human-readable assembly for x86 (16/32/64-bit), ARM, ARM64, MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC, SystemZ, XCore, M68K, TMS320C64x, M680x, and EVM architectures. Capstone is the disassembly engine embedded in many major security tools including Ghidra, radare2/rizin, Cutter, Binary Ninja, and dozens of others. Its design emphasizes thread safety, zero external dependencies, and rich detail extraction - each disassembled instruction includes operand details, register access information, and instruction groups. Bindings are available for Python, Java, Go, Ruby, Rust, OCaml, and many other languages, making it the standard building block for custom disassembly and binary analysis tools.
About RetDec
RetDec is a retargetable machine-code decompiler based on LLVM, developed by Avast. It converts executable files (PE, ELF, COFF, Mach-O, Intel HEX, and raw binaries) back to high-level C code from x86, ARM, MIPS, PIC32, and PowerPC architectures. RetDec performs compiler and packer detection, static library signature matching, instruction idiom translation, type recovery, and control flow structuring to produce readable decompiled output. Unlike architecture-specific decompilers, RetDec's LLVM-based intermediate representation allows it to support multiple architectures with a single analysis pipeline. It includes both a command-line decompiler and an IDA Pro plugin, and can output C code with recovered variable names, types, and function signatures. RetDec is particularly useful for analyzing firmware, embedded systems, and malware targeting non-x86 architectures.
Platform Support
Tags
Shared
Capstone only
RetDec only