Have a client that's claiming complied C is harder to reverse engineer than sudo "compiled" Perl byte-code, or the like. Anyone have a way to prove, or disprove this?
I don't know too much about perl, but I'll give some examples why reversing code compiled to assembly is so ugly.
The ugliest thing about reverse engineering c code is that the compilation removes all type information. This total lack of names and types is very the worst part IMO.
In a dynamically typed language the compiler needs to preserve much more information about that. In particular the names of fields/methods/... since these are usually strings for which it is impossible to find every use.
There is plenty of other ugly stuff. Such as whole program optimization using different registers to pass parameters every time. Functions being inlined so what was one a simple function appears in many places, often in slightly different form due to optimizations.
The same registers and bytes on the stack get reused by different content inside a function. Gets especially ugly with arrays on the stack. Since you have no way to know how big the array is and where it ends.
Then there are micro-optimizations which can get annoying. For example I once spend >15 minutes to reverse a simple function that once was similar to return x/1600. Because the compiler decided that divisions are slow and rewrote that division by a constant into several multiplications additions and bitwise-operations.