Unlike the Linux implementation, the current implementation of VM attach mechanism on macosx sends a SIGQUIT to the target process without additional checks to verify that the target JVM process has reached a state where it can handle the SIGQUIT. It has been reported recently in a few issues that because of this, the target process may receive the SIGQUIT when it's still in the early stages of launching and upon receiving that signal, the process terminates/crashes. https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8344671 has details about such problems.

If feasible, it would be better to introduce some checks, before sending the SIGQUIT to the target JVM so that these issues can be prevented.