10 years old

10 years passed since the first release of radare, and 8 since radare2. It was pretty primitive at the time, and lot of things has happened since that.

SPOILER: Radare2’s Congress Announcement

The tool was mainly used and written by me (@pancake) from the very first days. I was missing many interesting features in the opensource reverse engineering so I decided to collect and integrate all the interesting things that could fit on top of an abstracted IO layer, from disassemblers to debuggers or filesystems.

Personally I have been doing talks, trainings and writting documentation, though even it hadn’t got much contributors or enough community interest, but it was ok. It was just a personal project I was having fun with.

During the last 4 years, the project got some international attention thanks to new contributors (xvilka, jvoisin, crowell, ret2libs, alvarofe, maijin, and many others!). Actually there are about 400 users on IRC + Telegram chats. The amount of contributors grows on every new release.

The current state of the project makes me switch from author/developer role to leader/maintainer. This change implies much more things that it seems at first sight.

To start with, testing regressions, managing bugs and milestones becomes much more important than before.

Being able to organize a Summers Of Code (RSoC and GSoC) and instructing contributors to follow the project’s indentation rules and doing several reviews on every single pull request makes the community much more stronger and the final product can be trusted much more.

There’s still a lot of work in the infrastructure side to enhance: enabling https, dockerifying the entire service setup, automating the Android and iOS builds, polishing the windows installer, automating packages building, etc.

The size of the community right now is big enough to be able to organise congress around the tool. There’s people around the world using r2 for their own use or at company, automating malware analysis, solving crackmes, reverse engineering firmwares, carving memory, …

In order to celebrate the 10th aniversary of the project I’m happy to anounce the first ever edition of the r2con! It will be the 8th, 9th and 10th of September, in Barcelona!

You may find more information about the talks in the official webpage: See you there!

–pancake