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Ida Free

hex-rays.com

13 pointsShank6 comments

IDA free is a long running joke.

Hexrays have a long history of pricing non-professionals out. Super high fees, expensive upgrades and an extremely useless free version is a slap in the face to anyone that wasn't born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

Hacker unfriendly, closed source, shitty SDK and constantly breaking API. I haven't used IDA in years and I have no desire to go back.

This blatant grab at relevancy is too little, too late IMO.

There are loads of great, free or inexpensive RE tools that we should focus on instead.

All hail the King

As one who programmed Python in Hex-Ray, i was able to find differences in code between two like-binaries in a jiffy (using pseudo-IR tagging that disregards offsets).

Useful in catching modified code (intentional or not).

But that costed us a pretty penny to do just that.

Yep, I had similar stuff about a decade back, probably around the time there was someone who developed python bindings for ida and holy fuck was it painful to do in their official SDK, which IIRC was C++.

Radare2 has some really nice, easily scriptable stuff, you should check it out if you haven't before.

I was just writing some python code these days for ida debugging and a simple dump(type, address) function took me 2 days to implement. I still don't know how to get a tinfo_t from a struc_t. The api is a thin layer over the c++ implementation, is very non pythonic and poorly documented. The debugger freezes so much that i had to use the windbg backend. It still doesn't support multi databases, or at least a builtin way for multiple module analysis in a single session. I have to keep 8 windows open and calculate rvas by hand between them. It doesnt even tell you in which module you end up in, or when it does it's wrong. Not fun. The c decompiler is nice though. But i definitely wouldn't pay my own money for it.

Too little, too late.

When I wanted to buy a personal copy of pro after having purchased IDA Pro + decompiler like 5 or 7 different times with different employers over the last 15 years, they wanted full retail prices. No discounts, wouldn't give me info for my old license to do an "upgrade" license, even though they are named licenses.

For the home version they want you to buy a copy per processor type, like, why... I want to be able to disassemble pic16, arm or riscv stuff for embedded stuff, and I'm not going to pay 600 or whatever a pop.

This is a move born out of desperation and a great example of how a niche company killed a golden goose. It was fine for them to be... difficult to deal with, when they were the only game in town, but with binary ninja and ghidra picking up all the net new people, I suspect hexrays will be in difficult times over the next decade.

Still $$$ for crippled functionality.

As an alternative, https://binary.ninja is gaining traction at work.

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