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> What is bizarre to me is that Oracle relied on receiving SIGSEGV as normal mode of operation. That should have been a hint where things are going, no?

Not bizarre at all, this how the runtime has always operated, as anyone one who's ever attached a debugger to a Java process knows. The SIGSEGV handler is also responsible to handling NullPointerExceptions IIRC.

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Correct:

> ... the JVM can intercept the resulting SIGSEGV ("Signal: Segmentation Fault"), look at the return address for that signal, and figure out where that access was made in the generated code. Once it figures that bit out, it can then know where to dispatch the control to handle this case — in most cases, throwing NullPointerException or branching somewhere.

https://shipilev.net/jvm/anatomy-quarks/25-implicit-null-che...

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