Not every social interaction needs to be a debate with a winner and a loser, my man

It almost assuredly was not escalated to global. I received the same canned answer from them earlier and asked to be put in contact with a person from the European company.

Their response was to send me here: https://www.haier-europe.com/en_GB/technical-assistance/contact-us/

If you poke around, you’ll find that there is no effective way to contact anyone by email unless you’ve got a specific support question with a model number attached, so I sent an email directly to support.ecommerce@haier-europe.com

Will it matter for anything? Probably not. Will at least one guy have to read some stern words about an attack on open source development? Yep, and that’s good enough for me I guess :P

Probably depends on how comfortable you are at reading assembly instructions for your specific CPU, but I think generally the contextless source code is probably preferable. Either way you’ve got a headache of an investigation in front of you though.

here’s an example of what it might look like with either option

It depends on the specifics of how the language is compiled. I’ll use C# as an example since that’s what I’m currently working with, but the process is different between all of them.

C#, when compiled, actually gets compressed down to what is known as an intermediate language (MSIL for C# specifically). This intermediate file is basically a set of genericized instructions that are not linked to any specific CPU. This is useful because different CPUs require different instructions.

Then, when the program is run, a second compiler known as the JIT (just-in-time) compiler takes the intermediate commands and translates them into something directly relevant to the CPU being used.

When we decompile a C# dll, we’re really converting from the intermediate language (generic CPU-agnostic instructions) and translating it back into source code.

To your second point, you are correct that the decompiled version will be more efficient from a processing perspective, but that efficiency comes at the direct cost of being able to easily understand what is happening at a human level. :)

The long answer involves a lot of technical jargon, but the short answer is that the compilation process turns high level source code into something that the machine can read, and that process usually drops a lot of unneeded data and does some low-level optimization to make things more efficient during actual processing.

One can use a decompiler to take that machine code and attempt to turn it back into something human readable, but will usually be missing data on variable names, function calls, comments, etc. and include compiler-added optimizations which makes it nearly impossible to reconstruct the original code

It’s sort of the code equivalent of putting a sentence into Google translate and then immediately translating it back to the original. You often end up with differences in word choice that give you a good general idea of intent, but it’s impossible to know exactly which words were in the original sentence.