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Topic created on: September 23, 2007 00:54 CDT by c1de0x .

Has anyone who was on the beta of HexRays (or who has purchased the release version) written up a review?

I'm thinking of buying, but not sure.... Would like to get some third-party verification of how it works.

igorsk		September 23, 2007 14:13.59 CDT
Don't have a review but you should check the video on www.hex-rays.com, it shows some features. I can also answer any questions or show how it works on a specific program.

iyegypt		September 23, 2007 17:40.32 CDT
hexrays features decompilation of an exe in a c or visualc++ syntax , hexrays put a plugin hexrays.plw for ida pro 5.1 for users that upgraded ida 5.0 also i didn't find

neoxfx		September 23, 2007 23:00.14 CDT
I was on beta list. I should say, Ilfak has done a neat job. It is worth the price and will be a great addon to RE arsenal.

c1de0x		September 25, 2007 06:20.42 CDT
Hey All. I've seen the video and all the 'official documentation'... It looks really great. What I'm looking for is some third-party verification and discussion of how well it functions on an actual RE project. If i'd been on the beta list, I'd write up a review myself (nudge igorsk ;)). Has anyone who's actually purchased it got a few mins to write up a blow by blow review?

igorsk		September 25, 2007 07:59.19 CDT
I don't think you can do a review in "a few mins". I have a few observations though. Proper typing is everything. It can reduce a five-line cast into a single line call. Most of Win32 API functions do have proper prototypes so their arguments are typed automatically, but you need to create structures for any user type to get proper code. Here's where IDA's interactivity really shines. The core C decompiler is very good. It handles most of MSVC's idioms and picks up a lot of inlined standard functions like strlen/strcpy. However, highly optimized code can produce a lot of gotos. Some of the current deficiencies: 1) no support for c++, exceptions or floating-point 2) if you rename a structure, all of the functions that were using it will fail to decompile 3) there can be a lot of redundant variables produced when the data is copied around 4) you can't "split" a variable when a stack slot is reused for something with a different type I hope some of these can be addressed with the SDK. P.S. Ilfak mentioned "maybe next year" for ARM support :)

mozilla		September 28, 2007 03:55.33 CDT
I was also at the beta list and bought the final release because of the results you can get from hex-rays. I had a look at other decompilers in the past and from my point of view hex-rays is the 1st one that produces usable results. It's true that results can be improved if you do the basic stuff in IDA. But even without that hex-rays saves a lot of time and money, if assembler isn't your native language. Hex-rays is NOT a "just press F5 and recompile the code"-tool, but in my tests I had some examples where that would be possible ;-). It's a tool to make RE much more efficient and it's a tool for professionals that (almost) know what they are doing. Hope that helps a bit ;-)

c1de0x		August 17, 2008 11:11.04 CDT
Well. In the end I bought Hex-Rays, and I have to say that I am very impressed with it! It speeds up reversing time by at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude, especially when you use good typing. Number 2 on igorsk's list above seems to be fixed in newer builds. The variable splitting thing is a real pain in the arse... If anyone knows of any plugins which address any of these... please let me know!

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