Even if this program was not obfuscated by garble, compiled in the traditional way, it will still be flagged as malicious by many antivirus engines, regardless

Even if this program was not obfuscated by garble, compiled in the traditional way, it will still be flagged as malicious by many antivirus engines, regardless of whether it is signed or not. IMHO these days it's far more about whether your binary is "known" than what it actually does. AV is a protection racket. I realised that long ago when "hello world" executables compiled with MSVC passed, but the same source code ran through GCC was deemed malicious and quickly deleted.