Scripting provides a powerful means for extending IDA’s capabilities. Through the years, scripts have been used in a number of innovative ways to fill the needs of IDA users. Many useful scripts are available for download on the Hex-Rays website as well as the mirror site of the former IDA Palace.^[113] IDA scripts are perfect for small tasks and rapid development, but they are not ideally suited for all situations.

One of the principal limitations of the IDC language is its lack of support for complex datatypes and the lack of access to a more fully featured API such as the C standard library or the Windows API. At the expense of greater complexity, we can lift these limitations by moving away from scripted extensions and toward compiled extensions. As we will show in the next chapter, compiled extensions require the use of the IDA software development kit (SDK), which has a steeper learning curve than either IDC or IDAPython. However, the power available when developing extensions with the SDK is usually well worth the effort spent learning how to use it.