In a previous discussion, Tim Newsham said

“I would like to see someone reverse engineer some small Haskell programs. The compilation techniques are totally foreign to anyone familiar with standard imperative languages and there are no tools designed specifically for the task.”

He then provided a link to some examples to analyze. Another commenter brought up Standard ML, another functional language. (I assume he means the NJ Standard ML implementation, but it could also be OCaml or Moscow ML as Dan Moniz pointed out.) Tim responded:

“I don’t know entirely. I’m not familiar with ML compiler implementation. They could use similar compilation techniques, but might not. ML is not ‘pure’ (and additionally is strict) so the compilation techniques might be different.”

He also provided links to a couple papers on implementing compilers for functional language. One commenter took a brief look at Tim’s examples:

“I took a look. The compiled Haskell is definitely different from the compiled ML I looked at. Roughly the same order of magnitude as to how terrible it was, though. Mine actually used Peano arithmetic on lists for simple arithmetic operations. What was funny was the authors of that program bragging about how algorithmically fast their technology was. I couldn’t help but think, after examining some entire functions and finding that all of the code was dead except for a tiny fraction of the instructions, how much a decent back-end (something with constant propagation and dead-code elimination) could have improved the runtime performance.”

Since one common obfuscation technique is to implement a VM and then write your protection code in that enviroment, how obfuscated is compiled object code from standard functional programming languages?