[jcranmer]

Well, I would say that the tool to really beat here is IDA Pro, with radare2 largely feeling like a poor man's attempt at IDA from my limited trials of it. In the past decade, Binary Ninja and Ghidra came out to also compete in this space, and the cutter project came out to give a sorely-needed GUI for radare2. Of the new tools, the only one I've tried is Ghidra.

Personally, were cost not an issue, I would just stick with IDA. However, IDA Pro is obscenely expensive, with the cheapest version "only" $365/yr and a full version costing into the tens of thousands, and it's not clear to me that the cost is worth it. I've had a lot of paper-cuts with Ghidra, but it still feels far better to me than radare2.

[tptacek]

OT: I thought I had an idea of what it is you do, but now it's clear I don't, and I'd love to hear more about why it is you've evaluated all the mainstream reversing tools. :)

[jcranmer]

Reverse engineering is mostly a side interest of mine, but I do have a bad habit of overestimating the complexity of the bugs I encounter and launch into reverse engineering software to figure out why it's not working properly.

I actually work on compilers, so training myself on reverse engineering isn't totally useless, especially since a lot of what I like is about the pattern recognition of more advanced compiler features. And if you're trying to retrofit high-level optimizations in a low-level backend, reverse engineering the high-level structures is exactly what you need.