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

> 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.

- Authors: Omar Abusabha; Sungjae Hwang
- 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
- Sources reviewed: 2026-10-20
- Added to the catalog: 2026-10-20
- Original paper: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24955>
- PDF: <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.24955v1>
- Project: <https://github.com/lion10/csur2026_binary_decompilation>
- BibTeX: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/citations/paper-evolution-binary-decompilation.bib>
- Catalog page: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/paper-evolution-binary-decompilation/>
- Record JSON: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/paper-evolution-binary-decompilation/record.json>
- Chinese version: [简体中文](https://awesomerea.org/zh/papers/paper-evolution-binary-decompilation/index.md)

## 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 notes

The manuscript says under review at ACM Computing Surveys. 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.

## Primary sources

1. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24955v1>
2. <https://arxiv.org/html/2608.24955v1>
3. <https://lion10.github.io/>
4. <https://github.com/lion10/csur2026_binary_decompilation/blob/e733872b892148660737926743dcbd864af86f6c/README.md>
5. <https://github.com/lion10/csur2026_binary_decompilation/blob/e733872b892148660737926743dcbd864af86f6c/papers.csv>
6. <https://api.github.com/repos/lion10/csur2026_binary_decompilation/git/trees/6895d55f00b8520ec345d0380c0efa65969462dc>

## About this entry

Reviewed against the paper and its primary sources. Cite the original authors using the linked paper or BibTeX.
Original editorial content: MIT. Linked projects, papers and assets retain their own rights and licenses.