Nick Burns wrote:
REC is an impressive free deCompiler (better than a simple disassembler) its based off of boomarang
REC uses compiler dependend pattern matching which often fails miserably for modern code, it doesn't recognize a huge amount of >i386 opcodes (even some i386 opcodes) and I've seen way too many segfaults when dealing with large programs. I'm not sure if the situation has changed with REC 2.0 but as the author admits that the backend hasn't really changed I doubt it.
REC is also (debian) non-free (instead of boomerang, which is open-source and much more advanced from a architectural point of view but isn't really usable for larger binaries either).
You're much better off with some assembly knowledge and a good disassembler.
Felix