Eliminate dead, unreachable code

[ChlorideCull]

It would be great if an additional "simple" dead code elimination step could be enabled. Certain obfuscators tend to like inserting blocks of code which will break compilation as-is, like

if (!true)
{
    RuntimeMethodHandle arg_43_0 = methodof(CP.V(int)).MethodHandle;
}

Obviously, !true will never be true, but the presence of the code is enough to throw off Microsoft's C# compiler, since methodof doesn't exist.

Slightly harder, but still doable, is something like

while (true)
{
    switch (2)
    {
    case 0:
        continue;
    }
    break;
}

As the switch will never hit a case (no default, only case is not the same as the constant), it can be completely removed, only leaving a while (true) { break; }, which could also be removed.

[akyryz]

What about a plugin for this kind of stuff?

[dgrunwald]

I don't think it's a good idea for us to start an arms race with obfuscators. But I'm open to the possibility of allowing plugins to add passes to the decompiler pipeline.

[siegfriedpammer]

If anyone is interested in contributing such a feature, we'll be glad to help providing an plugin interface. But for now we are closing this.