# capstone-engine/capstone

Capstone disassembly/disassembler framework for ARM, ARM64 (ARMv8), Alpha, BPF, Ethereum VM, HPPA, LoongArch, M68K, M680X, Mips, MOS65XX, PPC, RISC-V(rv32G/rv64G), SH, Sparc, SystemZ, TMS320C64X, TriCore, Webassembly, XCore and X86.

Repository: https://github.com/capstone-engine/capstone
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/capstone
Homepage: http://www.capstone-engine.org
Language: C
License Family: other
Topics: reverse-engineering, disassembler, security, framework, arm, arm64, x86, sparc, powerpc, mips, x86-64, ethereum, systemz, webassembly, m68k, m0s65xx, m680x, tms320c64x, bpf, riscv
Last push: 2026-08-24T16:00:15+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 97/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:39:23.370411+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 94, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4663, "days_push": 9, "days_rel": 43, "gap_med": 27, "n_releases_24m": 14}
- flags: no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 8976, forks 1718 (observed 2026-08-28T04:10:26.575021+00:00)

## What it is
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
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: reverse-engineering, parser, security, developer-tools
- domain: security, reverse-engineering, developer-tools
- platform: windows, cross-platform, python, go, rust, jvm, cpp, c
- tags: disassembler, binary-analysis, multi-architecture, malware-analysis, x86, arm, riscv, mips, bindings, linux, macos, android, ios, nodejs

## Member repositories
- capstone-engine/capstone (main) score 97

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:10:26.575021+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:24:25.412204+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/capstone-engine/capstone (fetched 2026-08-28T04:10:26.575021+00:00, sha f82bb566070b)
  - homepage: http://www.capstone-engine.org (fetched 2026-08-29T08:24:29.912257+00:00, sha cef3ee343d3b)
  - site_page: http://www.capstone-engine.org/documentation.html (fetched 2026-08-29T08:24:29.921616+00:00, sha 91a8a3f579e0)
  - site_page: http://www.capstone-engine.org/features.html (fetched 2026-08-29T08:24:29.923484+00:00, sha 688ae0cd3cf1)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.