Hacker News Reader

Comment by roelschroeven | Hacker News Reader

> > Won't this get flagged by anti-virus scanners as suspicious?

> Unfortunately, yes. We consider this a problem for the anti-virus scanners to solve.

I don't think the anti-virus scanners consider Zig important enough, or even know about. They will not be the ones experiencing problems. Having executables quarantined and similar problems will fall on Zig developers and users of their software. That seems like a major drawback for using Zig.

View on HN

Yup. This sentiment expresses quite clearly how Zig has no significant understanding or interest in being a language used for widely distributed applications, like video games.

There's no way I can ship a binary that flags the scanners. This wouldn't be the first language I've avoided because it has this unfortunate behaviour.

And expecting virus scanner developers to relax their rules for Zig is a bit arrogant. Some virus scanners started flagging software built with Nim simply because Nim became popular with virus authors as a means to thwart scanners!

Yeah, I had this problem when shipping go binaries on Windows. Antivirus vendors really do not care that your program regularly shows up as a false positive due to their crappy heuristics, even if you have millions of users.

Have you tried code-signing with an EV certificate? If so, did it help? Asking for a friend.

Statistically notable improvement, but it didn't help a whole lot.

I always upload a copy to https://www.virustotal.com to help combat the false positives.

It was really bad a couple years ago because anything wrapped in Inno Setup kept being flagged. Now maybe one or two flag vendors do; Bkav Pro and CrowdStrike Falcon are the dominate culprits always.

Uploading to virustotal doesn't really do anything to combat false positives AFAICT. It only lets you test against many AV vendors at once.

It's a common enough issue with go that they wrote a faq on it too: https://go.dev/doc/faq#virus

>> Unfortunately, yes. We consider this a problem for the anti-virus scanners to solve.

In reality it will be a problem for the developers to solve, and the solution will be to use a different language lol

Antivirus is going to flag you no matter what if you're not a big-name developer with an expensive certificate. Even a "hello world" GUI program done with MSVC and Win32 gets called the Wacatac Trojan without one. We shouldn't let their incompetence dictate how our software works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com