Three new debuggers
We continue to add more debugger modules to IDA and improve the existing ones. This version introduces three new debuggers: bochs, gdb, and windbg.

Each of these debuggers deserve a separate article, so only the most interesting highlights here:

Bochs: can run any 32bit code, from a few instructions to whole operating systems. Just click F9 and immediately switch to running state. In fact, any code snippet can be executed
in a safe and user friendly way. With the bochs debugger, we offer three different worlds: run-any-code-snippet facility, windows-like-environment for PE files, and any-bochs-image
bare-bon machine emulation mode. Please read more about Bochs plugin here: http://hexblog.com/2008/11/bochs_plugin_goes_alpha.html

GDBServer: x86 and arm targets are supported. Among other things, it is possible to connect IDA to QEMU or debug a virtual machine using VMWare.

Windbg: both user and kernel mode debugging are available. IDA can automatically load required PDB files and populate the listing with meaningful names, types, etc. Speaking
of PDB files, IDA imports more information from them: local function variables and types are retrieved too, c++ base classes are handled, etc.

The GDBServer and Windbg debugger modules support local and remote debugging. We tried to make the debugger modules as open as possible: target-specific commands can be
sent to all backend engines very easily.

Better analysis
IDA understands GNU-style function arguments (when they are moved onto the stack instead of being pushed). Analysis is more efficient in general and does does fall into the
instruction creation/deletion loop. Many FLAIR signatures have been updated and new ones added.

Command line
The command line was present in IDA since very long time but it was not turned on by default. This version activates it and empowers it with the following interpreters:

IDC: native IDA language (we added support for global variables)
Bochs: to send arbitrary commands to the Bochs debugger
GDBServer:to control GDBServer targets
Windbg: to access Windbg extensions and kernel information
Python : to program IDA in the popular language

The new IDA supports Python out of box, thanks to Gergely Erdelyi, who kindly agreed the Python plugin to be included in the official distribution.

+ added block comments
+ added support for function comments
+ added command to hide cast operators from the output (hotkey is \)
+ added warnings. they can be suppressed by WARNS1 parameter in hexrays.cfg
+ derived types are saved into the database: now decompilation results should not differ between sessions
+ improved the speed of batch decompilation: better handling of decompilation queue
+ references to " r" and " s" special stack frame members are renamed to "retaddr" and "savedregs"
+ mach-o: __cls_refs and __message_refs sections are handled in a special way
+ added special handling for elf .got sections
+ added special handling for mach-o __pointers section
+ reserved words can not be used as local variable names. the function name is rejected too
+ if the user requested a bitfield for a constant, use it even if some bits have no corresponding symbolic names; these bits are printed in hex
+ added rule: *(x+y) => x[y]
+ sdk: added get_line_item() to facilitate mapping of line items
+ sdk: added hxe_text_ready and hxe_print_func events
bugfix: expressions with pointers to arrays were suboptimal; if such types were used for function arguments, the output would be wrong
bugfix: small (4 byte) arrays could be used as scalars in the output, which was wrong
bugfix: if instruction bytes were patched without reanalyzing them, the decompiler could interr
bugfix: error message for 16bit applications was wrong
bugfix: decompiler could create fastcall functions with __int64 register arguments
bugfix: tail call to unknown function could lead to interr
bugfix: the decompiler could crash in some exceptional circumstances
bugfix: fixed a typo that could lead to a crash
bugfix: if a funcarg was also represeting the return value, the function prototype could be modified during analysis
bugfix: could interr on a linux syscall if it was the last instruction of the function
bugfix: if the user modified a structure field type, it would be detected by the decompiler
bugfix: mul64 recognizer could create an interr