Capstone is an open-source disassembly framework that converts raw machine code into human-readable assembly instructions across more than a dozen CPU architectures.
The library supports x86, x86-64, ARM, ARM64, MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC, and several others, with bindings available for C, Python, Go, Java, and more. That breadth is the point: most projects doing binary analysis need to handle more than one architecture, and building reliable instruction decoders from scratch is tedious, error-prone work. Capstone handles the decoding layer so developers do not have to. The project lives at capstone-engine.org and ships under a BSD-style license.
Disassembly sits at the core of security research. Malware analysis, vulnerability research, and fuzzing all require reading machine code that was never meant to be read. A well-maintained, architecture-agnostic library that does this reliably has become a foundational dependency across a wide range of open-source security tools, because the alternative is maintaining your own fragile architecture-specific parsers indefinitely.
The project surfaced on Hacker News this week with modest traction, a quiet reminder that some of the most load-bearing infrastructure in the security tooling world never gets a launch event.