Xojo 2022R3.1 crashes galore

[Arnaud_N]

@Greg_O

It’s entirely possible that Xojo has no information to offer us yet, heck, they could be bound by a developer NDA for all we know.

They could still tell us about that.

[Arnaud_N]

@ChristopheDV

Well, I had an idea. I put the full Xojo folder on an old slow USB stick (FAT32 formatted). Launched it from that stick and … it loaded fine from the first time.

Now you have some tracks to explore.
Perhaps the original folder is sort of blacklisted? What if you put the Xojo folder back to the Applications folder and just rename it?
You can make interesting experiments at this point, to narrow down the issue.

[ChristopheDV]

Wereever I put Xojo on the SSD, it will not launch.

[James_Pitchford]

Christophe

It might be worth visiting your System Settings/General/Login Items. I had tried disk utility, I had reloaded a clean MacOS, I had reloaded Xojo and plugins, I had removed plugins etc and still got crashes. Then I turned off a whole load of “Allow in the Backtground” login items that must have been in my system for years - and I haven’t had a crash since (hoping I’ve not now jinxed myself!).

Edit: for the record I turned off:
1Password7
Acrobat Creative Cloud
BBLaunchAgent
Blackberry Ltd
Blackberry Link helper agent
Bombich Software
Carbon Copy Cloner
Citrix Online LLC
Code 43 Software
GPSocketUSBService
Jakob Egger
LMULaunchAgentFixer
LogMeIn Inc
OSMessageTracer
raupdate
Research In Motion Limited
scxfmond
Seagate Storage Gauge

[ChristopheDV]

Xojo crashes on a fresh installed macOS 13. It has zero to do with things that are running in the background.

[Geoff_Perlman]

It appears to be an issue only with the MBS plugins and only on Ventura. If you can reliably reproduce the issue with other plugins (with the MBS plugins not loaded), please let us know. Christian has filed a report with Apple and we are continuing to research the issue ourselves to see if there’s anything we can change that would result in the plugins not crashing the IDE. Should we make progress on that (Javier has been looking into it for a few days now), we will let you know.

Update: To be clear, here at Xojo we have only seen it when loading the MBS plugins. We have been unable to reproduce it with other plugins or without plugins at all. That does not mean there’s something wrong with the MBS plugins. At this point the cause is still unknown. It could be an Apple bug. It could be a Xojo bug. It could be an MBS bug. We are working on the issue here to see if we can figure out what is causing the crash.

[Christian_Schmitz]

@Geoff_Perlman, Xojo crashes without MBS Plugins, too.

And the crash I reported to Apple is about Xojo alone crashing when loading the internal plugins. You may be very interested to call someone at Apple and check their dylib loader.

[James_Pitchford]

@Geoff_Perlman

an issue only with the MBS plugins

In my tests on Ventura on an M1 Mac Xojo r3.2 was crashing regardless of whether or not MBS plugins were installed. It did not crash on a clean install of Ventura on a virtual machine on the same Mac. I did not remove Xojo’s plugins. I removed older background login items (which in theory shouldn’t make a difference) and Xojo now loads reliably (no crashes yet). Maybe just luck…?

[Anthony_G_Cyphers]

Just to add my experience, I only see crashes with the MBS plugins (haven’t tested any others, or even without the default plugins) or when I’m running low on system memory. Though, admittedly, I am testing with a slightly older version of MBS.

[Geoff_Perlman]

@James_Pitchford

I removed older background login items (which in theory shouldn’t make a difference) and Xojo now loads reliably (no crashes yet). Maybe just luck…?

You mean login items for your macOS user account? I wouldn’t think those would make any difference. Perhaps that was just coincidence.

[James_Pitchford]

@Geoff_Perlman

Perhaps that was just coincidence.

Well, I thought I’d just test again. So I turned on the background login items again, restarted and guess what… Xojo crashes again.

Edit: and to continue the saga, I just turned them off again, restarted and Xojo loads fine. Coincidence still?

[Marc_Vos]

I have this too. Without 3rd party plugins, it does not crash.
So I tested adding MBS plugins, until I have the plugins I currently need for my projects, and that resulted in the following list:

MBS Xojo Mac64bit Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacBase Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacCF Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacCG Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacCI Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacCloud Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacCocoa Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacControls Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacExtras Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacFrameworks Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo MacOSX Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo Main Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo Network Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo Util Plugin.xojo_plugin
MBS Xojo Win Plugin.xojo_plugin

and with those, Xojo doesn’t crash anymore.

But … there is another ‘crash’-problem, with and without 3rd party plugins: when I set a breakpoint, the <appname>.debug crashes. I can run it without breakpoints, but not with them. I tried this with 6 or so Xojo projects of mine, and it happens with all of them.

---

Intel Mac, macOS Ventura, Xojo 2021 r3.1. MBS plugins 225.

[Beatrix_Willius]

I have always worked with only the MBS plugins that I need and Xojo crashes for me every couple of restarts.

So is anyone doing a DTS? I don’t care if it’s a Xojo, Apple, MBS or whatever problem. It needs to be solved.

[ChristopheDV]

@Geoff_Perlman

It appears to be an issue only with the MBS plugins and only on Ventura. If you can reliably reproduce the issue with other plug

That is not true. It can crash without MBS plugins too.
Keep in mind this seems to be a Xojo issue only. I have not seen crashes of other apps (incl. Xcode that also load a lot of dylibs.

[Geoff_Perlman]

That’s very interesting. What are those background login items then? That might be a clue.

[ChristopheDV]

FWW I do not have any login items.

[James_Pitchford]

Listed above.

[Bob_Grommes]

FWIW 2022R3.2 is giving me no issues but that’s with macOS desktop target developed with the macOS IDE, medium sized app but all very vanilla, no plugins beyond the ones that ship with Xojo, no fancy tricks, custom canvas or direct system calls in my own code. And I haven’t upgraded to Ventura. And judging from threads like this, will be in no hurry to do so. I have certain … disappointments with Xojo as a total platform, but so far this isn’t one of them.

That said, if I had commercial products and had to support Ventura I could only go so far telling my customers Ventura doesn’t have its act together and to wait a few months to upgrade. In this particular case it’s probably not unreasonable to hope though that some combination of Apple Ventura patches and hacks on the Xojo side will calm all this down in the coming couple of quarters. The take-away is probably to get out in front of future Apple OS releases by setting expectations with customers that we will support all future macOS releases but can’t always be in lockstep with them. So don’t upgrade on day one. That’s never a really good idea anyway, and many corporations are in fact 2 or 3 os releases behind routinely anyway.

[Geoff_Perlman]

You could turn off half of them and reboot. It would be useful to narrow it down to the one or more login items that cause the problem.

[James_Pitchford]

Updated to MacOS 13.01 and can’t get it to crash at all now. 12 restarts without problem with various combinations of logins.