What language will protect my source code?

Question

I wish to create shareware software that contains a registration algorithm. I am looking for a programming language, that cannot be easily decompiled into readable code. F

Answer 1

Delphi is not dying, it is alive and well.

As is the community, at delphifeeds.
You can also see more delphi projects, Freeware, shareware and commercial at the Delphi Wikia.

Thus I'd say Delphi is a very good choice for Software Development. Freeware, Shareware or Commercial.

Update: On September 1st 2011 Embarcadero released Rad Studio XE2. This released adds 64 Bit Compilation, Livebindings, Native Mac OSX compiling, IOS (via XCode) and a whole lot more to the already powerful delphi Dev environment.

Answer 2

If your CPU is able to see the code and run it, by definition, a sufficiently talented person can do it too.

You can, however, make it harder by running your code through an obfuscator.

Answer 3

Very simple:

No Programminglanguage,No Programm can Protect your Software. The Software Cracker will reversengine your App till it is just asembler and will crackt it.

Answer 4

You can't be 100% sure nobody will able to read your code, but you can make it very hard. You can encrypt your code and modify it during run time.

For example I have not heard of any successful attempts to reverse engineering Skype.

Answer 5

I am going to make the assumption that because you're writing shareware and you mention a registration algorithm you are wanting to protect your software from a keygen or patch that bypasses the restrictions on your trial versions.

Really the most you can do is deter. Like others have mentioned there are obfuscation techniques available, but they are not preventative. There are commercial software packers available which compress the file and make it initially unreadable. But the program has to be decompressed at some point so the machine can run it, so it's still reversible.

And that is pretty much the crutch against any of the anti-reversing techniques you'll see. It has to be interpreted by the machine at some point. More modern packers use anti-debugging techniques to deter the more novice reversers. But these techniques end up being documented rather quickly on popular reversing sites. Many of the techniques are bypassed with nothing more than a simple debugger plugin.

The only way I can think of to protect your executable from being arbitrarily reversed is to run the whole thing on a server you control and just pipe the output to users. But that's not always feasible.

As far as your language options go, take a loot at this. I can't really speak to how complete it is but I'm sure some others can add languages they think of.

Answer 6

This is not so much a matter of choosing the right language as it is finding a tool that will do code obfuscation for you. Nothing is bulletproof, but there are efforts to accomplish this sort of thing.

Eg. see this research project about Java code obfuscation.