I am probably missing something very important. The description below, taken from the “Stunnix C++ Obfuscator” page on Apple’s Downloads Website

Obfuscate/scramble (make unreadable), watermark or compress C++ or C source code (e.g. for giving out some library in source form) by renaming all names, uglifying strings and integers and stripping comments out. [emphasis added] (link)(screenshot)¹

I have generally understood, though maybe not wholeheartedly accepted, the ‘need’ to obfuscate interpreted languages. It is quite bothersome waiting on somebody else to fix a bug (as I had to do at a previous job) because you can’t touch their code. It is a horror coding story waiting to happen, were the obfuscated-code providers to fall off the face of the Earth².

But why, oh why would you obfuscate code to be compiled, short of having fun? Especially, as the description says, why ship the obfuscated code? I have always looked upon code, where available, as serving some practical purpose. Just because I can open it with a text file does not make it ’source form’.

I can imagine some scenarios where compilation has to happen on the client’s side (wrapped code etc) so maybe somebody has seen this ‘in the wild’ and can attest to the widespread disease use of such techniques.

UPDATE: To add insult to injury, upon trashing the demo a couple of log files were left behind, unclosed. That means they could not be removed from the Trash whatsoever. lsof and ps indicated a couple of perl scripts still running. Even if I wanted to obfuscate my code, this software doesn’t quite look like the one I would turn to for the job.

1. Yes, the interface is as ugly as the screenshot makes it to be. It’s a web application of sorts, but the colour scheme will make you puke after prolonged exposure. [↩]
2. Just thinking of how some people would try to use obfuscated code by wrapping and extending and… argh! [↩]