Oracle Warns macOS 14.4 Can Cause Java to Terminate Unexpectedly

[JonaM]

The latest patch does seem to have broken an unusually wide array of things. Applying the Ventura patch seems to have crippled Google Meets in Chrome - video conferencing on 13.6.5 is virtually unusable, so the patches do seem to have altered something unusual on the OS.
But as their statement says "reverting MacOS patches is not easy" - why does Apple make you erase your entire disk (including the user data partition) to revert to an earlier version?!?

 

[AlmightyKang]

Yeah, such management is bad and found in multiple places.
Personally I still prefer those to new developers entering the labour market with strong beliefs that the language and tools they used in school will magically solve all issues and then enthusiastically go on and start rewriting all old code. And because they can't be bothered to research business logic or feature requirements, as soon as they run into challenges that their new tool/language won't magically solve, they immediately limit the scope and end up with "new" versions of applications that runs a new codebase but is worse that the old in all ways .

By the it is time to move on to a new employer, leaving all the issues, feature gap and extra layer of maintenance behind.

Oh totally agree on that one. Here's a typical story.

We have a chunk of software which was written circa 1997 in Visual Basic by someone who knew what they were doing. This was very carefully engineered as a verbatim port of something off AS400 written by someone who knew what they were doing. This is a mathematical process which MUST produce a balanced output applying a number of rules and a large volume of data. Over time the dataset has increased from 5,000 things to about 27,000,000 things and the number of rules from 25 to 2,750. If anything is slightly off, we get in deep poo poo. This handles a few tens of billions of dollars worth of numbers to give you an idea.

Roll on 27 years, we have had the following things happen:

• When C# came out, contractors were hired to rewrite it. They rewrote it as a chunk bunch of DataTables which blew the RAM on the machines we had them and also did not balance. They left and were paid.
• About 5 years later, someone apparently competent came along and wrote a complex constraint network driven rules engine in C#. They coded themselves into an algorithmic scalability corner resulting in the job taking 2 hours and left blaming us.
• VB6 was deprecated so we had a mass panic and hired a contractor to port it verbatim to VB.Net with lots of cut, paste and test cases. He left after taking up smoking as a hobby. It limped along next to the old version and any weirdness was fixed by me over the space of a whole year.
• A couple of years later, a new outsourcer was thrown at it. They ran it through a language translator which converted it to C# and charged us a small fortune for lying about the job being a rewrite.
• About 3 years ago, one of our new architects was all over the JavaScript ecosystem like a seagull on chips, so he got his best two guys to try and rewrite it in nodejs. They have zero mathematical knowledge of even basic things like rounding and as I'm sure most people are aware here, the type system in JavaScript for numeric types is a disaster. End game, they could never get anything to balance or run reliably and both the architect and the two developers left.
• 2 years ago we paid a contractor to port it to .Net Core, shovel it into docker and kubernetes where it now has to fire up a dedicated node every time we run it, which takes 4-5 minutes to start then the job takes 20 minutes to run.

It's all crap. Must have blown half a million dollars on it by now.

I'd rewrite it in Go and it'd work, because it'd be roughly a copy and paste, but I can't be bothered as I like an easy life.

 

[MilaM]

But as their statement says "reverting MacOS patches is not easy" - why does Apple make you erase your entire disk (including the user data partition) to revert to an earlier version?!?

It should be easier, I agree. The best solution would be, if Apple kept the previously installed OS on disk. But that would be a difficult proposition for all those with full SSD drives.

 

[apparatchik]

Apple is notorious for breaking things and just not caring. That is why business IT has moved away from Apple. In the end Apple products are designed for teenagers or teenager wannabes.

You’d be surprised how much developers (including Linus Torvalds, Linux creator) use Macs.

You just stay, say, one version behind, when authoring applications, etc. as any OS update can break things, this applies to Windows, Linux, etc.

Regarding running applications, there are businesses running on very old (and unsafe) versions of Windows and even Internet Explorer.

 

[MilaM]

You’d be surprised how much developers (including Linus Torvalds, Linux creator) use Macs.

I think he's using it without macOS though. There is Linux port called Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon based Macs.

 

[manofthematch]

Funny how many people do not understand what Java is today and tell us their opinion anyway.

Dunning-Kruger effect is calling.

 

[Zapski]

Oh, I see. Pretty short sighted from Oracle. Thankfully I stopped using their builds as soon as OpenJDK arrived.

It’s pretty amazing how long they did it. In Windows installations it was done for *years* eventually prompting Microsoft to take action against it with security updates.

Vintage Ask toolbar is malware – and we'll kill Jeeves, says Microsoft

Redmond, in the butler's bedroom, with the iron pipe

www.theregister.com

 

[Zest28]

Does iLok/PACE still exist? That **** needs to die.

Good that it no longer works.

 

[minimo3]

For a non-dev here, I still have programs asking to use Java, namely MATLAB.
Good thing updating macOS is a little more forgiving than iOS or iPadOS.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Java on the desktop was for the longest time literally the only way to write a cross platform app (windows, Linux, Mac) without having to write 3 completely versions at 3x the cost. Which is why all the IDEs like Eclipse, Jetbrains, MATLAB use it. Nowadays there’s Electron (Chromium + JavaScript) but vendors who have tried using it (Microsoft Teams) have discovered it’s even more resource hungry and slower than Java which is why Microsoft has resorted to writing native apps for Windows and Mac for the next iteration of teams. (I think they dropped Linux because it was too expensive to write a full app just for a small user base).

 

[1129846]

That's not a reason to keep maintaining dinosaur tech. Where I work, most of our server side problems are caused by buggy java apps and applets. Java needs to die.

Give you a hint it is not Java causing the problem bugs. It most likely issue in the code and it just happens to be older single purposes applets written ask to do a lot more then they were intended.

Replace the language same issues just different syntax and different crash messages.

 

[00001000bit]

As much as I hate Oracle as a company, it's so weird to see a thread that's panning Java (est. mid-90s) as old/obsolete/dinosaur tech while simultaneously praising Python (est. early-90s) as a replacement. (I'd hate to tell you how old C is.)

They're not even generally competing on the same things. Python gets a lot of use as a rapid prototyping and glue language. It's pretty much become the de-facto scripting language built into apps that allow programmatic scripting (like CAD apps) and is pretty much the next step when you've outgrown a shell script.

But, the speed, garbage collection, package management, and strong/static typing in Java make it a more robust choice for large systems that need to be maintained across multiple developers. Type errors that you wouldn't catch until runtime in Python (because you're getting erratic behavior) will be caught at compile time in a static-typed language. I'd at least get if the complaints were "Java sucks ... use Go or Rust" those are at least similar systems. I feel like everyone panning it thinks that Java begins and ends with the awful browser applets (that hasn't been the case for 20+ years.)

 

[1129846]

The latest patch does seem to have broken an unusually wide array of things. Applying the Ventura patch seems to have crippled Google Meets in Chrome - video conferencing on 13.6.5 is virtually unusable, so the patches do seem to have altered something unusual on the OS.
But as their statement says "reverting MacOS patches is not easy" - why does Apple make you erase your entire disk (including the user data partition) to revert to an earlier version?!?

The reason often times that you can not just revert to an earlier version with out a full wipe is during the update changes are made to files and database that are not compatible with earlier versions of the OS. Mix that with the earlier versions have no way to do the needed updates/ changes to go to an earlier version.

Updating on the other hand they know the version number of the old stuff and know what changes need to be done.

I have done update in the past on things i have worked on that involved dropping a table or running a script deleting bad data. Problem is if you used the update on an older version of the app it crashed as things it was expecting are missing.

 

[AlmightyKang]

I think he's using it without macOS though. There is Linux port called Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon based Macs.

The very nature of which is a Mac that doesn't work properly 🤣

 

[AlmightyKang]

As much as I hate Oracle as a company, it's so weird to see a thread that's panning Java (est. mid-90s) as old/obsolete/dinosaur tech while simultaneously praising Python (est. early-90s) as a replacement. (I'd hate to tell you how old C is.)

They're not even generally competing on the same things. Python gets a lot of use as a rapid prototyping and glue language. It's pretty much become the de-facto scripting language built into apps that allow programmatic scripting (like CAD apps) and is pretty much the next step when you've outgrown a shell script.

But, the speed, garbage collection, package management, and strong/static typing in Java make it a more robust choice for large systems that need to be maintained across multiple developers. Type errors that you wouldn't catch until runtime in Python (because you're getting erratic behavior) will be caught at compile time in a static-typed language. I'd at least get if the complaints were "Java sucks ... use Go or Rust" those are at least similar systems. I feel like everyone panning it thinks that Java begins and ends with the awful browser applets (that hasn't been the case for 20+ years.)

I think the thing to bear in mind is that most people here who think Java sucks and Python is mana from heaven have never actually inherited a large python project.

Absolutely in no way do I want anything to do with Python ever again.

 

[bobbie424242]

I'll be honest, I didn't even know Java still existed.

Yet it will outlive most commenters here.

 

[Darren.h]

WOW! up to 14.4 and 2 major bugs. The Audio plugins affects me. I dont care what anybody says. Sonoma has been the worst unstable macOS upgrade ever.

Lets up we can get back on track with 14.5 update.

 

[Shirasaki]

Wow, no wonder why my MATLAB on Mac has been randomly unresponsive lately. Luckily, I have a Windows laptop to get the work done, otherwise I would really be on the verge of a breakdown.

Yeah Java is still quite relevant.
Yet those just exact hatred towards Java for some weird reason, without knowing how important Java is. And those claiming Java is ancient tech, simply does not understand what we have today is built on those so-called “ancient techs”.

 

[krakenrelease]

Oh you poor soul. Spring's acres of XML era was pretty awful. I avoided that but I did inherit a Spring.Net project a number of years ago. That was like Spring on Java but less mature, with poor documentation, land mines everywhere and ran on top of IIS just because you needed your balls kicking just that little bit harder.

Glad I don't do that now!

NET Core is a bazillion miles ahead of that now

 

[rlarsen_eu]

Ignoring all the useless java-hating-bandwagon comments...

I've been running macOS 14.4 on an M2 MacBook Air with Temurin OpenJDK 11 and have not experienced this. Perhaps this is only an issue with Oracle Java. If so, it sounds like there is indeed a workaround, then.

I'm running macOS 14.4 on my MacBook Pro M3 Max with the latest JDK 11, 17 & 21 all the official JDKs from Oracle, and I have so far not had any issues - I'm also a macOS developer, which mean I have also been running all the macOS 14.4 developer beta releases, and have not had any issues there either.

So I don't know what I have to do to get the JDK to crash - any ideas ??

 

[DougieS]

Another one of those technologies… php

I don’t really use it for PHP haha, but PHP isn’t as bad as people say.
Use it for mainly for NodeJS development, decent editor and lots of features.

 

[JosephAW]

Some of us need Java to access our security cameras.

 

[bsolar]

So I don't know what I have to do to get the JDK to crash - any ideas ??

The bug report provides code for a small C program that should reproduce the underlying issue on affected systems.

I do get SIGKILL on my system, which is unexpected according to the bug report.

 

[Asbow]

To put things into perspective…
When Mac OSX Snow Leopard was released, it broke Adobe CS software. Photoshop was broken, InDesign, etc. it wasn’t until 10.6.8 that Snow Leopard became the masterpiece that history remembers.

And PostScript fonts.

 

[The Barron]

I’m a Java backend engineer and my company provided Mac was updated to 14.4 and I’ve been experiencing unexpected termination of my dev environment a few times a day ever since. I thought it was the IDE, but it’s really frustrating to learn that it’s Apple to blame.

I detect a TROLL here. Boo

 

[Westside guy]

These are exactly the kind of out of touch and stereotypical "Apple user" responses that are such a turn off to so many
We can do better than this everyone

Well, this MacRumors after all - a significant chunk of the userbase are Mac fanboys who mainly come here to interact with other Mac fanboys.

That sounds way more disparaging than I actually intend! Basically - this isn't a news site, it's a fan site.

But... yeah. There are a few server-side technologies which are in wide use, but that I personally wouldn't mind seeing die off. Java is one. Node is another.