How to disable pkgload

[jeroen]

Unfortunately, pkgload does not work for packages that require initialization of an external library. For example it consistently crashes with the V8 package.

To reproduce you need libv8:

brew install v8

And then you see this: https://youtu.be/vL-kXDEaC4A

It crashes quite frequently for me with c/c++ packages, but V8 is the most reproducible.

[hadley]

https://github.com/r-lib/roxygen2/blob/master/NEWS.md#code-loading 😉

[jeroen]

Thanks!

[jeroen]

Btw, an option to globally opt-out of all pkgload everywhere is very high on my wish list :)

[hadley]

Is it possible to fix the underlying problem in pkgload?

[jeroen]

I don't know exactly how pkgload works and what it does wrong. In general, unloading and reloading of symbols from dll's is very tricky and OS specific, I think it is very hard to do this reliably.

Maybe pkgload should only be used for packages without compiled code, or perhaps packages with compiled code but without a Makevars so that it only uses the default compiler and linker flags.