[hbn]

Earlier this year I spent a month or 2 working on a little Go project for a very niche little usecase (it would read a MIDI file and write it to a text file in a format that could be inserted into Super Mario World romhacks [or try to anyway])

After spending all that time working on it, I was hoping that I could just compile to the various OS/architectures and distribute that, but once someone tried using it I quickly found out that as soon as you downloaded my program, Windows Defender would flag it as malware and quarantine it. Even the builds in my project workspace that I compiled myself would get flagged/quarantined once it caught them.

I tried doing some research and it seems to just be a regular thing with Go apps because I think the runtime code would be common across malware written in Go, so basically all Go programs are automatically assumed to be malware by Windows unless you buy a cert and/or get enough people using it.

Or maybe this is more common than just Go programs. I've never really done anything like this before. But I ended up just abandoning attempting to release it properly and left the source code up on Github so if someone wants to compile it themselves they can. But the whole experience was a bit discouraging. It seems like there's really no cheap/easy way to distribute software. Webapps require hosting, and native code is assumed to be malware by default.

[Shadonototro]

windows defender

aggressively scan every .jar, but totally ignores .net executables

no wonder they do something similar with go executables, it's easy to recognize them after all