How safe is PHP bcompiler encoded code?

Question

I'm interested if anyone knows exactly how effective/safe/protected PHP's bcompiler is against reverse engineering. The introduction page makes a bold claim:

In terms of code protection, it is safe to say that it would be impossible to recreate the exact source code that it was built from, and without the accompanying source code comments. It would effectively be useless to use the bcompiler bytecodes to recreate and modify a class.

Perhaps the key word is "exact" -- how true is their claim if you remove it?

PS - Please, no lectures about compilation/obfuscation versus licensing. :)

Answer 1

Bcompiler is now decompiled, see the link (registration is required)!

However check the archived version.

The files are called: ModeBIphp53Updated2.rar, ModeBIphp52ts.rar and MMcache+EA.rar.

Answer 2

It is just as safe as compiling C++ to ASM. It CAN be reverse engineered or understood by careful reading and logic, and can be edited to, for example, add 10 coins instead of 5 very easily. However, it takes a long time to understand even a short piece of the byte code, and the original source code could only be re-written by hand. The variables names and such would be unrecoverable in most cases.

In other words, PHP is the pizza recipe, the bytecode is the hot fresh pizza. You COULD find out the original recipe but it would take very long, be very difficult, and you would not know that the chef nicknamed pepperoni "Roni".