3 ms·

I just for the life of me don't think I'd ever be able to understand the x86 instruction set and truly get into reverse engineering. Most RE's I've known have s

• saagarjha 5y ago
  All those people were exactly in the situation you are in right now at some point in their lives. You don’t have to learn the whole thing in one go: start by understanding how your C code works and you’ll slowly come to understand more and more low-level code as a side effect.
• dataflow 5y ago
  https://gcc.godbolt.org/ https://gcc.godbolt.org/ might make things more manageable.
• ackbar03 5y ago
  You sort of just have to dive into it, it gets better with actual practice. The first time I did some practical RE i was trying to ahem crack something and spent over a few weeks on it. Then one night I couldn't go to sleep and just thought fk it i'll give it another stab, made myself a mug of coffee and voila, everything just clicked together.
• colejohnson66 5y ago
  The x86 instruction set is insanely complicated due to decades of history, but that’s exactly what drew me in, personally. Over a few years of diving more and more into the architecture, I’ve become somewhat fascinated by it. Despite all history, there’s still some interesting patterns that can be uncovered in the bit representations. A nice exercise that’s helped me a lot is to write a very simple program in assembly, look at the output, and see how it all pieces together. Even random instructions that make no sense other than to see how it’s turned into machine code.