Walking The Last Mile: Studying Decompiler Output Correction in Practice

The increasing prevalence of Python has spurred interest in decompiling Python PYC bytecode. This work presents the first large-scale study on human-assisted Python decompilation in the wild, leveraging extensive data from pylingual.io, spanning 181,646 PYC binaries, 9,003 user-submitted patches, and 393 accuracy-verified patches. We investigate how reverse engineers respond to inaccurate decompilation and identify factors influencing their efforts to achieve accurate decompilation. We complement this unprecedented observational data with a controlled user study that isolates the technical difficulty of patching imperfect Python decompilations.