The editor was originally designed to recover a deleted file from an HFS+ partition.

After that, pancake decided to extend the tool to have a pluggable io to be able to attach to processes and implemented the debugger functionalities, support for multiple architectures, and code analysis.

The need for scripting showed the fragility of the initial design: a monolithic tool made the API hard to use, and so a deep refactoring was needed. In 2009 radare2 (r2) was born as a fork of radare1. The refactor added flexibility and dynamic features. This enabled much better integration, paving the way to use r2 . Later on, the r2pipe API allowed access to radare2 via pipes from any language.

What started as a one-man project, with some eventual contributions, gradually evolved into a big community-based project around 2014. The number of users was growing fast, and the author-and main developer-had to switch roles from coder to manager in order to integrate the work of the different developers that were joining the project.

The project remains active at the time of writing this book, and there are several side projects that provide, among other things, a graphical user interface (), a decompiler (r2dec, ), Frida integration (r2frida), Yara, Unicorn, Keystone, and many other projects indexed in the (the radare2 package manager).

Since 2016, the community gathers once a year in r2con, a congress around radare2 that takes place in Barcelona.