I wrote a 1,200 line dll in C++ for one of my favorite video games from when I was a teenager. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DXHR). Along with a few hundred line GUI for it in Python.

It took a long ass time, lots of iterations, tweaking, recompiling, crashes, etc.

Then I spent a couple of hours writing some JavaScript in Frida and have essentially entirely emulated my dll. With so much more ease and reduced that 1,200 lines of C++ to just 200 lines of JavaScript.

Mind you, my dll received commands from a GUI via IPC originally. Not sure how to emulate that functionality in Frida other than NativeFunctioning the hell out of some WinAPI functions to setup a named pipe for communication. But overall it's insane to me how easy this process was.

Prior to this I essentially only used Frida to output function parameters, return values and do traces of functions I was reversing. Then I just decided to give it a go and to my surprise it worked.

So if you're looking to prototype and mockup mods prior to writing an entire dll with boilerplate and other bloat: Do the iterations and tests in Frida first.

Of course Frida can't do everything C++ can. There may be instances in which more complex scenarios require iterations in C++ but you can absolutely do a lot in Frida.

Big game changer for me. This will make modding so much faster and easier. 🍻