It's certainly a neat hack, but legally I would avoid this approach unless the original creator is cooperative or at least no longer around. Distributing code

It's certainly a neat hack, but legally I would avoid this approach unless the original creator is cooperative or at least no longer around. Distributing code derived in this manner is pretty clearly copyright infringement unless the original license allows it. I am not a lawyer, but I would argue that, while reverse engineering to allow interoperability is acceptable, doing so by purely copying the original is not, and performing mechanical transformations on the code (disassembly/recompilation) is not enough to cause the resulting code to be a non-derived work. That said, I can see how this is a technologically reasonable first step toward a new implementation. Once this initial translation step is done, individual functions can be swapped out for new (non-translated) versions fairly easily by editing source code, as opposed to patching the original binary. Later in the post, there's mention of replacing commonly-executed functions with native versions to improve performance and allow porting to other environments.