Ask HN: What would you look for in a hobbyist alternative to IDA Pro?

4•jdbohrman•5mo ago

I've built a really solid binary analysis engine and decompiler thanks to the support of the work down in other crates such as:

- Petgraph - Goblin - Capstone - And a few others

And I wanted to ask the community what you would look for in a hobbyist alternative to IDA Pro assuming I decide to support students and devs while also having higher tiers.

Out of these features, which would you be able to sacrifice the most and which would you need to do your work as a hobbyist/student:

- LLM Binary Chat (For asking simple non-deterministic questions) - YARA-based Scans (Provide your own YARA rules given a minimal template) - Decompiler - Batch? - VS Code Extention? - API? - X Amount of Usage?

Comments

kenmacd•5mo ago

My suggestion: asking for sacrifices for non-commercial users is the wrong approach. You want users to ask their employers to get licenses and adding a bunch of limitations will just make them more likely to use/learn something else.

jdbohrman•5mo ago

Amazing feedback. I'm absolutely listening to this. I've been honestly feeling a similar way myself. Also thank you for giving your thoughts.

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