Hacker News Reader

Comment by SonOfLilit | Hacker News Reader

Reverse engineering is one of the core skills employed in vulnerability research. If I'd glance behind the shoulder of a security researcher and not see an IDA or OllyDbg window open, I'd be very surprised.

View on HN

Immunity debugger is quite useful as well.

Of course, if you really hate yourself, GDB on Windows is a thing...

If you're looking for a tool professionals actually use every day that requires you to hate yourself, WinDbg scores higher on both counts

What's wrong with WinDbg?

The same thing that's wrong with GDB. It's command based and most of the commands are hard to remember.

That's understandable. Recent versions of windbg have improved a bit in that regard. Most of the new functionality has been added to a more regular data model that you can browse through, and querying the data can be done using a "linq style" syntax so you can use programming knowledge instead of learning some arcane debugger commands. You still need to know the basics of flow control, but the shortcut keys for those are common with a number of other tools (e.g. F5 to run)

Their scripting engine is probably the worst programming language I have encountered (perl is readable by comparison).

That's why I was really extatic when Windbg devs introduced a standard script engine, only to learn later on that was JavaScript ...

Any specific complaint with JavaScript as the choice? The biggest downside I'm aware of it's the lack of direct support for 64bit numbers. What language would you have preferred? Python maybe?

Javascript is actually a sane choice for extending a debugger (event-based, async calls builtins, etc.) it's just that I'm not familiar with :p

I would have expected Windows to go with Powershell as their scripting engine, that's why I was surprised with Javascript.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com