Comment by boricj

I'm working on ghidra-delinker-extension [1], a relocatable object file exporter for Ghidra. Or in other words, a delinker.

Delinking is the art of stripping program for parts, essentially. The tricky part is recovering and resynthesizing relocation spots through analysis. It is a punishingly hard technique to get right because it requires exacting precision to pull off, as mistakes will corrupt the resulting object files in ways that can be difficult to detect and grueling to debug. Still, I've managed to make it work on multiple architectures and object file formats; a user community built up through word of mouth and it's now actively used in several Windows video game decompilation projects.

Recently I've experimented with Copilot and GPT-5.3 to implement support for multiple major features, like OMF object file format and DWARF debugging symbols generation. The results have been very promising, to the point where I can delegate the brunt of the work to it and stick to architecture design and code review. I've previously learned the hard way that the only way to keep this extension from imploding on itself was with an exhaustive regression test suite and it appears to guardrail the AI very effectively.

Given that I work alone on this in my spare time, I have a finite amount of endurance and context and I was reaching the limits of what I could manage on my own. There's only so much esoterica about ISAs/object file formats/toolchains/platforms that can fit at once in one brain and some features (debugging symbols generation) were simply out of reach. Now, it seems that I can finally avoid burning out on this project, albeit at a fairly high rate of premium requests consumption.

Interestingly enough, I've also experimented with local AI (mostly oss-gpt-20b) and it suffers from complete neural collapse when trying to work on this, probably because it's a genuinely difficult topic even for humans.

[1] https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-delinker-extension