rene77

Oh, believe me, it's boring as hell. It's just endless hours of making sense of incomplete hardware manuals, converting tables to code by hand and handling subtle hardware differences. And what I did was console game modding - something that did look exciting at the time. IDA itself must be even worse, seeing how its codebase is two decades old by now.

As for the modern dev experience, what else do you expect? FOSS starved small software vendors by raising the bar for commercial software, so Microsoft has barely any competition in their field. Sure, there's JetBrains software, but that's it?

Oh no, they were sore about this like you wouldn't believe. They'd rather refuse a legitimate customer than risk a leak. I can't even say they were entirely wrong: the sensitive nature of reverse engineering makes it hard to make sure you won't get ripped off. Still, they did take this personally.

Doesn't this just prove that Ghidra is actually very, very old? By the UX alone, I'd place it in the 2003-2006 range, the time when the excitement of Mac OS X turned into a new generation of bombastic widget toolkits.

I believe the pricing is high by necessity - we're talking about employing some dozen of people on the higher end of competency doing terribly unexciting work. Hobbyists should settle on the Hopper tool, which is $99 a year.

Also, if you wanted to advocate for FOSS, compilers are an all around terrible example. In fact, they prove my point: thanks to GCC and the likes, we're still stuck with hodgepodge of fragile build systems, platform-dependent code and poor IDE integrations. Hell, modern programmers will be right at home with 1988's compilers, seeing how Makefiles are still somehow relevant even today.

Compare that with the early 90's Turbo Pascal which had an IDE with a built-in help system, a build system, a debugger, and a profiler. We could've had competition to improve upon all that, and instead it's 2021, and you have to spend hours per project to keep the tooling from breaking. In my carreer, I've probably spent more paid hours setting up "free" tooling than I paid for commercial tools. It's just a sad lose-lose situation for everyone.

Decompilation isn't exactly a rocket science: just about anyone capable of hacking on clang or gcc can write a simple decompiler. The entire point of IDA was that they've done that, and also a lot of tedious, boring work on providing support for lots and lots of different CPUs. There's just no secret sauce recipe for SREs to steal - even their FLIRT tech is documented on their site.

Ghidra's existance is a bit unfortunate, really. While it was released relatively recently, it's already a dated product permanently stuck with a clunky UI. And by being free, it'll create an extremely high bar for possible commercial products to clear. Combined with the extremely small market of low-cost SRE tools (so small in fact, that Hopper's author decided against porting their tool to Windows), we'll be stuck with IDA and Ghidra (and all their idiosyncrasies) for the next decade at least. Which is a damn shame.

Shenanigans like that the product owe to its author, Ilfak Guilfanov, who's a bit of a meme in the ex-USSR SRE community. Back in the '00s, when IDA pretty much had no alternative, one couldn't just buy it. No, to pay them money, you had to be either an estabilished name (ESET or Kaspersky worked just fine), or to subtly caress the author's ego until it gives. And I've seen paying customers being kicked off the support forum for asking uncomfortable questions, complete with rude private messages. I believe that at least twice, unrelated hackers took offense and leaked the full version anyway. Fun times.