Eh, I have a feeling the reason why your stream analysis was so easy back then was because you were working with such small binaries. As I&#x27;m sure you know having a variable length instruction set like x86 makes it really really really (really) hard to even heuristically analyze the right &quot;stream&quot; to take. Each potential fake branch can potentially double* the analysis IDA is forced to do. Even with 6.8, analysis for reasonably complex binary can run into the minutes. Even with great heuristics, it&#x27;s not as trivial as just &#x27;render alt-streams&#x27; in column 2. Seriously, look at the call-graphs of any modern binary in IDA. It&#x27;s insanity. 
That being said, there are plugins for PyIDA Pro that do what you&#x27;re saying to a certain extent. IDA Pro in my mind is sort of like emacs -- a decent platform, but the strength really comes from the die-hard community of engineers who make things like org-mode and ELPA.<p>It is a fun arms race to watch though. Microsoft released their SAT solver Z3 on Github which they used to sell only to the enterprise (think: an oil provisioning company needs a bare minimum of various quantities of different types of refined oil as each source will have different distillation properties. Crude from Venezuela refines entirely differently than from the Gulf or from Russia. They need quantity Foo of gasoline to sell to a set of customers X with forecasted demands of Y, from various vendors who sell crude oil with variable pricing, quantity Bar of jet fuel, and quantity Baaz for plastics manufacturing. You then have production limits that each vendor can supply, etc). Anyways, tangent aside - Z3 is the best constraint solver out there (AFAIK, someone in academia please correct me), and it has the distinct ability to be useful in decompilation. Within 2 weeks of MS opening it up, I was seeing plugins for IDA that were integrating Z3 in a very, very useful manner. (Also IDA Pro even with Hex-Rays is not that expensive at all! Think about how much an average company spends on developer licenses for other tools, and it&#x27;s not quite cheap but definitely in line with what one would expect to pay for a tool you spend 6 hours a day as its fundamental to your job!<p>* Yeah I know this only applies up until the end of the &#x27;stream&#x27; remains valid, so in theory your complexity is only linear, not polynomial, but if you nest valid byte-streams, you get 2^(number_of_valid_streams_while_op_codes_remain_concurrently_valid_to_analyze).<p>Edit: Ha yeah my verbose post can effectively be dwindled down to what un:legulere said.