Unfortunately there’s not much we can do about this other than to have the JIT disabled by default on that configuration, and/or force people to (partially) disable the hardened runtime.

The gist of it is that x86 macs lack a certain feature that lets us safely toggle pages between being writable and executable (pthread_jit_write_protect_np), forcing us to rely on a technique known as dual-mapping where we have two different views into memory, one executable and one writable.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the only way to do that on a mac is to literally create a file and mmap(2) it twice, which I’m guessing causes the popups.

https://github.com/erlang/otp/issues/8043

If you’re using asdf, you can workaround this issue by disabling jit by adding: export KERL_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS="--disable-jit" to your .bashrc/.zshrc before installing erlang.

Not ideal, but so much better than the popup stealing focus every few minutes for me.

This answer on Stack Exchange suggests that it might have something to do with asmjit.