Note: While IDAJscript can do many things on its own, If you do need access to the full IDA API, I often use this as an IDC or IDAPython script generator. Its actually pretty convenient and allows you to review massive script actions for bugs before applying them.
quick overview:
script ida using javascript
full syntax highlighting, brace matching, auto indent, tool tips
intellisense
full debugger support, step in/out/over, breakpoints, mouse over variable vals
debugger cmdline to query/set vals, run functions etc
small IDA plugin as an IPC server with main UI as running out of process to simplify development.
IDA Compare will need similar updates and might just get converted to use IDASRVR as well and move the IDB exporter to the out of process GUI part. In practice it may take a while not because its hard, but because I dont care. I still use IDA 6.7 despite having access to the newer versions for exactly these types of upgrade reasons.
On 08.09.23 - 11:16am Dave wrote:
Ida is now doing away with its 32bit version fir 32bit disassembly and will doing everything from one 64 bit exe. I will be able to make this transition with it but not sure when I update my personal license. Too expensive to do arbitrarily. The x64 side of ida Jscript may just work without hiccup on 32 but binaries someone let me know
On 01.11.25 - 7:04am Dave wrote:
Note: this has been fixed in v3 with the new js engine.
The first versions of this project started when windows was 32bit only. VB has no support for x64 numbers natively. Keep in mind JS has a MAX_SAFE_INTEGER of:
0x001FFFFFFFFFFFFF vrs full x64 range
0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
This is why I handle x64 values as strings by default and have the x64 class to safely handle add/subtract/tohex for any condition.
I have tried to make this as invisible as possible, but do keep this in mind if you are using large JS native numbers in your scripts.
In x64 Disasm I did have a few places where you might get an 0x[decimal] number back. I think I have fixed them all now.
I am almost considering ditching the JS engine and switching over to python. Check this control out
after like a decade, ida compare is back in business. api changes after 6.9 drove me to drop it but i always missed it. now it uses the same idasvr plugin ida jscript uses and i switched it over to sqllite as the db provider (manual odbc driver install required). glad i finally bit the bullet. probably only took another
5 hrs.
In other news, I am thinking about writing an IPC plugin for binary ninja that supports the same outward api. It would be pretty cool if same IDA script worked in binary ninja too.
basically write as little as possible as a plugin, give yourself a standardized intermediate api, and do main development out of process. Just cant afford to keep having all your complicated hard to debug work broken over and over again. And at least have a shot of your same main code supporting multiple host processes.
On 09.05.25 - 4:00pm Dave wrote:
if you paste in the top basic style prototypes from /COM/ida.js or even just the list from above in this post without args and descript to chatgpt what you want your script to do, it does an amazingly good at figuring out how to wield this api and write complex scripts for you. blowing me away!
On 12.14.25 - 8:53am dave wrote:
btw is you feed idasvr.cpp into claude and tell it you want a compatiable interface for binary ninja im pretty sure he can just spit out pretty quickly ! you could even rig it with ghidra.
On 12.19.25 - 10:12am Dave wrote:
Ive actually just started leaving ida jscript open and using it as a command line interface to ida as I work.
This way i can pull a graph from the current function with graph(), or copy the current va while in the decompiler view with print(h(ida.ScreenEA())) or app.setClipboard(h(ida.ScreenEA())), or run ida.CloseDecompilerWindows() whenever.
