Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Swing and a miss.

My problem with IDA Pro isn’t even the license cost. It’s the licensing unfairness. Costs get multiplied a bunch of times if you want to work across multiple host OSes or want both 32 bit and 64 bit decompilation for an architecture.

I’m sure they know this stuff drives away home users, hence IDA Home. Where they miss, is what home users do. Home users do everything. I’ve seen people using Ghidra with 8-bit processors.

I don’t imagine things will continue to work out well with this strategy if Ghidra gets support for debugging and continues to receive improvements for its decompiler. Ghidra is already immensely useful today.

View on HN

I am wondering whether there is a management issue at Hex-Rays. The newly released company website features a page which appears to advertise against the product [1], because it entirely misses who their audience is.

The core point made regarding why IDA is a superior product despite license unfairness is vendor support. However, the authors seem to miss that the target audience of IDA are tinkerers, who would be fine with fixing their own tools as long as the issues are only on the surface.

Hex-Rays is not Oracle, who can afford to live from license unfairness because their product is embedded deeply into the livelihood of so many large companies. Hex-Rays provides just a tool, which I have already replaced by Cutter with Radare2 and Ghidra's decompiler in my workflow.

I would not use IDA Home even if it was free due to its limitations and lack of Hex-Rays' Decompiler.

[1] https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/compelling-reasons-to-...

Holy crap that's an awful website. It stinks of clueless desperation. I wasn't sure about trying Ghidra until seeing that site.

Wow I don't think I've ever seen marketing that bad that wasn't satire.

It is literally shit-talking their own product.

> Isn’t IDA an aging software?

> Doesn’t it have shortcomings?

> Or structural limitations?

> Also… It’s closed source, right?

> And how about its high price tag?

> Well sure [...]

I didn't have half of these preconceptions before reading this page.... but now I do.

Wow, yeah, I haven't seen marketing self-ownage like that since ARM inadvertently put RISC-V on everybody's road map.

"Well, sure, but" isn't something you see every day in a competitive context...

I don’t think hex rays even really has managers. I think there is the lead developer/founder/owner (Ilfak), an office admin, and I’d guess approximately 2-3 developers. The owner personally replies to most support emails or technical questions.

Ghidra is getting debugger very, very soon in public release. Actually, the debugger is already developed & now being tested in-house. It will likely be released in 9.2.x. [1]

[1] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues/24#i...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com