>>106480921
not him, but this is called decompilation. what happens is that you write code in a somewhat human-readable language, such as C, which includes many things only relevant to humans, like variable/function names, file names and layouts to keep relevant code together, comments, etc.
once you're ready to ship it, it's compiled into machine code. this strips away all the human elements and combines all the source files into one big blob of data that your cpu likes. compiler may also optimise the code, taking the more verbose and possibly redundant code and distilling it down to a purely functional version of itself, like if you've written something to be easy to modify later, but it only currently does a specific thing, the compiler may notice this and turn it into something simpler that just does that one thing.
turning machine code into "source code" is not too difficult, there's tools that do it, but it won't be readable. it takes a lot of time and skill to figure out what the code actually does, like translating raw cpu instructions back into something a human might have intended to write.
there's many examples of people doing this, like for example the semi-recent super mario 64 decomp (
https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64)
