We have actually been more inspired by Jetbrains lately than VS Code. Take that for what you will.
We do try to pick simple sane defaults while still allowing enough customization to adapt to different workflows.
Actually working on a startup wizard for first time users if they want to more closely replicate the feel of other RE tools since muscle memory is hard to break.
IDEs have changed a lot in the last 50 years. Just like we shouldn't advocate for hand writing assembly for all code, we shouldn't be stuck using CLI tooling the same way.
I share your apprehension regarding the current AI landscape changing so quickly it causes whiplash but I don't think a mindset of "it's been fine for 50 years" is going to survive the pace of development possible by better LLM integration.
The reason that tools have not changed that much is that our needs haven't changed that much either. Even something like `find` or `ffmpeg`, while complex, are not that complicated to use. They just require you to have a clear idea of what you want. And the latter is why most people advocating for LLMs want to avoid.
IDEs have not changed that much. They've always been an editor superchaged with tools that will all share the same context of a "project". And for development, it's always been about navigation (search and goto), compile/build, and run.
I don't know why people think this, you're not the first person I've heard it from either.
First, I literally saw them do shots during a talk yesterday for some first-time presenters. Secondly that WASN'T the "old defcon" either! Drinking is a relatively new tradition in the history of the con. I've spoken twice. Once at DC 17 (no shot offered) and once at DC 23 (shots were offered). There's video proof:
Can I just say, thanks to the person who posted this for waiting until this week to do so. (Side note: I suspect it was due to the recent coverage from C++ Weekly which is a great resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3F0Fw0R7ME)
As recently as last week we had some horrible performance problems but it looks like the queue (https://dogbolt.org/queue) is mostly still fine! Other than the long pole of a few of the decompilers being backed up, things are humming along quite smoothly! Josh + Glenn have done some great work on it! (https://github.com/decompiler-explorer/decompiler-explorer/c...)
Binary Ninja likewise is empty and keeps up just fine as well. It's not a coincidence that the two commercial products that are funding it are both confident enough to put their stuff online like this.
Yup, I'm aware of both of those, but none of those tools listed so far are intended for the IR to be for human-consumable unlike disassemblers and decompilers. You think disassembly is verbose compared to a decompiler? Go look at the equivalent Vex (Valgrind's IR) for any non-trivial disassembly. It's suuuper verbose.
As far as I know, BNIL (https://docs.binary.ninja/dev/bnil-overview.html) is the only one that is designed to be readable and it still wouldn't make sense to include it in an IL comparison such as the one done here for decompilation in my opinion.
That was indeed the logic. The two main commercial solutions included (Binary Ninja made by Vector 35, where I'm one of hte founders) and Hex-Rays both pay for all the hosting costs. And it's not particularly cheap -- there's a fair amount of compute to drive the decompilers especially as some of them are... not very efficient.
IRs aren't generally suited toward small snippets of examination by human when you're starting with a full binary. I would imagine something like that would only work well when done for very small bits of assembly. Likewise, you might be interested in BNIL which is an entire stack of ILs that Binary Ninja is based on. (You can see it exposed in the cloud.binary.ninja UI or the demo)
We have actually been more inspired by Jetbrains lately than VS Code. Take that for what you will.
We do try to pick simple sane defaults while still allowing enough customization to adapt to different workflows.
Actually working on a startup wizard for first time users if they want to more closely replicate the feel of other RE tools since muscle memory is hard to break.