Reverse Engineering of Legacy Code is Intractable

Reverse engineering of large legacy software systems is widely recognized to be a difficult problem. How bad is it? By an argument that identifies key underlying sources of the difficulty, reverse engineering of legacy code is shown to be intractable in the usual computational complexity sense. This conclusion implies that we should not be too enthusiastic about the ultimate value of reverse engineering as the centerpiece of a cost-effective approach to constructing new generations of systems.

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