What’s Adobe’s take on precompiled binary compatibility for Patch versions? ie. CF 2018u15 and CF 2021u5, XMLSearch compiled on earlier versions of CF are incompatible with these two updates, we get coldfusion.runtime.CFPage.XmlSearch(Lcoldfusion/xml/XmlNodeList;Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/Object;

I'd expect incompatibility across major versions, i.e. 2018 vs 2021. What your first sentence implies is the question is across patch versions, i.e. u1 vs u5, and I'm interested in whether those are officially compatible too.

Patch versions are often, but not always binary compatible. It's been this way for a long time. CF2018u14 and CF2018u15 are not binary compatible, and it's noted in the release notes for u15... They also broke binary compatibility between CF2018u10 and CF2018u11. It's happened at other times in the past too. The first one that sticks out in my memory was i think CF11u5, where they broken compatibility with a bunch of encryption functions.

There is mention in the release notes for CF2018u15, but not in CF2021u5. I wonder why that is.

hm, that's true. And the elvis operator breakage between vanilla and update 1 (that's the same as 2018u10 and 11) is also not noted in the release notes (but is in the 2018 notes)

can someone point me at these release notes ?

https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-2018-update-15.html Under "Known issues in this release"

pretty sure I read these in detail when they came out, and it wasn’t there… or I missed it.. either way, what a pain, because u15 compiled code is not compatible with u14 compiled code

You're probably right. There were questions in this channel about what even was the XML change they described. And then people started reporting that error. You can see the document was last updated on Oct 13, 2022 but the update was released Oct 11.

(sigh), I’ve come up with a precompiled UDF that it can switch back to if customers are lagging on their CF updates