As someone who is significantly smarter than me, how does Ghidra compare to IDA? I'd love to get into decompilation, but I've heard that the free tools leave a bit to be desired.
The IDA GUI and scripting functionalities are much more common in tutorials and the ecosystem, so the Ghidra learning curve can be greater, but it's not really inferior.
IDA has fewer decompilation/disassembly bugs but in both IDA and Ghidra, bugs are usually fairly easy to spot and not a huge detriment to achieving a goal.
IDA deals with C++ better than Ghidra (imo).
Anyway, for free Ghidra eats IDA's lunch, and the IDA home edition offering is weak - so for a hobbyist, Ghidra is a clear home run.
Ghidra's decompiler worked fine for this project. It made 2 relevant mistakes which I talk about in the blog posts, but they were fairly easy to identify when comparing with the disassembly.
As I discussed in the post, Ghidra did have some difficulty (which IDA did not have) locating all the functions, so I did end up using both Ghidra and IDA in the initial stages.
The progress that Ghidra is making though (e.g. the recent implementation of debugger support) is promising for the future.