If the JDK knows ahead of time it is going to crash there may be things it can do such as setting aside memory, or taking other precautions so that when the crash happens it is able to generate the information on what went wrong. There will be situations where setting aside memory, which is freed once the VM knows it is going to exit, won't help as the memory is corrupted, but as this is optional troubleshooting startup flag, if it doesn't help then we are no worse off.