In IDA, Menuet would probably be really easy to reverse engineer for a two main reasons: - Very, very little code. Everything is implemented in the most minim

In IDA, Menuet would probably be really easy to reverse engineer for a two main reasons: - Very, very little code. Everything is implemented in the most minimal way possible. This is extremely important - you can literally read through all the code in the kernel from top to bottom and be sure you haven't missed any functionality. Good luck doing that with some 1MB C program. - Almost no indirection. Few indirect jumps, almost no use of malloc (!). In IDA this makes it very easy to name functions and variables and easily see where they are used, which isn't possible for anything dynamically allocated, as in idiomatic C. This is to some degree IDA's fault: a smarter tool could do a decent job at automatically inferring the types signatures of C functions and provide similar functionality for struct fields, but IDA does not. However, it does make the problem more tractable in general. Note that reading the actual assembly, at a local level, is missing from that list. If anything, compiler generated assembly is probably easier to read, due to recognizable idioms, although there are exceptions such as repetitive code in inline functions or templates that would never be written by a human. (The fun thing is, with a decompiler you can actually read the code in question as C.)