Tag: x64dbg

Why I’m not using x64dbg

kao

x64dbg is (probably) the most user-friendly x64 debugger right now. It's pretty, it's open-source and it usually works. But I find it very hard to switch from WinDbg to x64dbg for several reasons. Some of them are purely emotional (don't worry, I'm not going to bore you to death explaining those) but most of them are technical and related to the way x64dbg is being developed.

So, here goes slightly exaggerated but still serious list of my grievances. 🙂

Insane system requirements

Both DNSpy and x64dbg suffer from this disease. They love to use the "latest and greatest" of technologies, meaning Visual Studio 2017, .NET 4.6 and what not. That's perfectly fine when you're writing normal software. But debugger is not a normal software.

If I have a customer with a software crashing on his production servers, I can't tell him "You need to install Windows 7 SP2 and 3 different VS redistributables and reboot your machine twice just for me to run my debugger". No, I really can't.

Debugger must run on any and all systems out-of-the box. Olly does that. WinDbg does that. And it wouldn't be hard to link x64bdg with static VS runtime libs and target WinXP while using all the modern goodies. But for some reason it's not done that way.

Updated 30-Sep-2016: Mr. eXoDia let me know that now x64dbg is distributed together with the necessary runtime DLLs. We can remove this grievance off of my list. Hooray! 🙂

Uncertain direction and feature bloat

Antoine de Saint Exupery said:

Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away

These are really wise words and Olly is designed that way. It does all the basic stuff and has stable SDK that enables plugin authors to implement all the extras.

On the contrary, Mr. eXoDia is adding features left and right and the direction of x64dbg development looks more like this:
BrownianMovement

For example, why does a debugger need 3 (yes, three!) different assembler engines?
assemble

Want another example? Let's just look at the latest weekly digest.. How about this:

... change to the info box. Basically the pointer values in the instruction were not resolved (so if the instruction contained qword ptr ds:[rsp+30] it would not show the value of rsp+30). Personally this is quite useless

Yes, Mr. eXoDia, you're right. It is useless for everyone but few people.

And how about:

The commands plugload and plugunload have been added. This is useful for plugin developers who want to test plugins without having to restart x64dbg all the time.

How many people in the entire world will actually benefit from that? 5? 10?

So, why add such bloat? Once you add something, that something must be maintained. And it's very hard to remove stuff later, as it might break something else. So, please don't..

Broken features

When I am on a job and need to debug something, last thing I want to spend my time on, is fighting with debugger bugs. And my customers certainly don't want to pay me for doing that.

Oleh Yuschuk got it exactly right with the OllyDbg. There were few releases - but they were properly tested and rock solid. From what I can see, x64dbg is going the other way:
compiles_ship_it

Frequent commits like "Fixed search for constant references", "Fixed intermodular calls in module", "Fixed FS/GS memory branch destinations" is not something you want to see in any software, let alone a debugger.

Well, it wouldn't matter much, if there was some known-stable version I could put in my tool collection and use it anytime anywhere. But no, Mr. eXoDia thinks that "No more excuses to not update every day!" is a way to go. Instead of using tried-and-tested version, I should use a probably buggy and unstable one? Dafuq?

Conclusion

So, those are my 3 biggest complaints about x64dbg. I'd love to love x64dbg. I'd love to use x64dbg for everything. But right now I just can't.

How about you?