[ahepp]

The market is guaranteed to stay small if the "hobbyist" version of the software is $350/y. I've heard great things about it, but that's pretty far outside the "try it out for fun" range. I had a lot of fun experimenting with hardware hacking and dumping the firmware of an ARM device I own, but I'm certainly not paying $350 for one architecture for one year just to explore whether or not I like reverse engineering. What about kids hacking raspberry pis?

I respect people's right to sell software, but I'm tempted to crack out the world's tiniest violin when I hear people complain that FOSS is eating their lunch. Consider how much good FOSS compilers have done for the world, and how many more people were able to program computers that otherwise would never have been able to afford it.

[rene77]

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.

[no_time]

>doing terribly unexciting work.

You mean writing reverse reverse engineering tools? Personally I can hardly think of a more exciting job.

Also blaming GCC for today's dev experience is just wrong. With some notable exceptions(VS debugger), the situation over at Microsoft is just as bad and in no way influenced by GCC.

[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?