Yesterday’s release of DocFetcher Pro 1.12 brought an upgrade of the bundled Java runtime from Java 8 to Java 16. Since then, there have been reports of macOS users being unable to launch the new 1.12 release, specifically users running macOS 11.3 and 11.4.
The likely reason for this launch issue is an incompatibility between the latest macOS versions and Java 16, and downgrading to Java 11 seems to resolve the problem. Therefore, the DocFetcher Pro 1.12 release files for macOS have been replaced on Gumroad. They have the same filenames as before, but now come bundled with Java 11. Give these new files a try if you experienced the 1.12 launch issue. The release files for Windows and Linux remain unchanged, if you’ve bought any of those.
In terms of performance, there’s virtually no difference between Java 11 and Java 16. Specifically, these are the measured index loading times with the benchmark from the previous post:
- DocFetcher Pro 1.11 + Java 8: 63.048 s (100%)
- DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 8: 15.316 s (24%)
- DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 11: 8.824 s (14%)
- DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 16: 8.726 s (14%)
As you can see from the figures, the downgrade from Java 16 to Java 11 results in an increase of index loading time by a measly 100 ms, which may very well be a statistical fluke. As before, all load times are averages over 10 test runs each.