A small bug was discovered in the treeview on the main form that contains the Run-Time Library file overview. After downloading and updating to the latest packages – the items still retained references to the previous packages prior to the update.
This sadly caused an access violation if you began navigating the treeview before clicking “Refresh Runtime library files” from the tools menu.
This was an oversight on our part as the RTL treeview should be automatically refreshed when the package-download form closes.
This has now been fixed.
Windows Defender false positive
Quartex Pascal is written in Embarcadero Delphi, which has been the favorite language used by hackers for a long time. This has the downside that a lot of virus killers (Windows defender included) can mistakenly flag executables created in Delphi as containing a malware (trojan usually).
This is because Virus killers scan for unique signatures (hash mapping) inside executable files, looking for specific signature matches – and thus picks up on chunks from the Delphi RTL which has nothing to do with any malignant code.
In other words, most virus killers blindly compare against digital footprints which also exists in harmless applications. It’s like flagging paw prints as bad without checking if its from a tiger or golden retriever.
This is well documented case (see links below) that sadly affects a lot of software out there. There is absolutely no trojan code in our executables. Our build server runs on Linux as well, and our back-end has two separate security systems as the binary travels from the compiler to our installer build process.
- https://en.delphipraxis.net/topic/10297-delphi-compiled-exe-are-flagged-as-malware-by-anti-virus-software
- https://en.delphipraxis.net/topic/10297-delphi-compiled-exe-are-flagged-as-malware-by-anti-virus-software/
Both executables that ship with our installer, the IDE and the update executable (which restarts the IDE after updating the main program) are signed with a commercial certificate – and there is simply no malicious code in our repositories. Everything is built from scratch on Linux, there is no way for a process to attach itself to a fresh binary like it could do on Windows.
So you can safely mark the executables as safe, telling Windows defender to ignore these.
The use of UPX
Many developers use a popular exe compressor called UPX. This takes your executable and compress it, basically creating a new exe file with the decompression code included. So when you start this program – the original application is decompressed into memory and executed.
While we doubt this has any effect on the issue we mention above, we have decided to stop using it. Just in case that can cause Windows Defender to overreact. There is nothing wrong with UPX and it’s been in use for decades by developers everywhere – so it’s doubtful that this will have any effect.
Either way, just to make sure we do what we can – its no longer used.
Get the latest update
Update or download the latest executable from our download page!