capstone-engine/capstone

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

8976 stars · 1718 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Capstone is a lightweight, multi-architecture, multi-platform disassembly framework written in pure C, designed to be the ultimate disassembly engine for binary analysis and reverse engineering. It provides a clean architecture-neutral API with detailed instruction decomposition and semantics, plus bindings for many languages including Python, Java, Go, and Rust.

Use cases

• disassemble x86 machine code into readable assembly
• analyze malware binaries with a disassembly engine
• build a custom reverse engineering or binary analysis tool
• disassemble ARM or ARM64 firmware
• embed a disassembler into a security tool or OS kernel
• decode RISC-V or MIPS instructions in an emulator
• extract instruction semantics like implicit register reads and writes

When to choose

• you need a fast, thread-safe disassembler supporting many CPU architectures
• you want a lightweight C library embeddable in firmware, kernels, or other tools
• you need detailed instruction decomposition and semantics across architectures
• you want bindings for your language of choice (Python, Go, Rust, Java, etc.)

When to avoid

• you need a full interactive disassembler with a GUI like Ghidra or IDA
• you need decompilation to high-level pseudocode rather than raw assembly
• you only target a single architecture and a simpler specialized disassembler suffices

Facets

library · maturity stable

reverse-engineering parser security developer-tools security reverse-engineering developer-tools windows cross-platform python go rust jvm cpp c disassembler binary-analysis multi-architecture malware-analysis x86 arm riscv mips bindings linux macos android ios nodejs

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