[R-pkg-devel] loadMethod() not available with Rscript
On Wed, 2017-09-20 at 09:45 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
Thierry, This has always been a considerable puzzle, and the source of some amusement, to me. It is a clear design bug in Rscript because _code that would otherwise work_ will not if it happens to rely on library(methods). S4 comes to mind. This has also been answered at least a few times on SO. Now, 'r' from littler always did this differently and lods methods, just like R itself does. And 'r' still starts (way) faster as I once documented in a blog post. If someone from R Core reads this and nods silently: please put this to rest and make sure Rscript also loads the methods package.
We have been here before, most recently in 2016 https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16921 There are opinions on both sides, of course, but the decision rests in the hands of those who use extensively for its original purpose (i.e. running short snippets of R code) and for whom the overhead from loading the methods package is still unacceptable, despite being substantially reduced since this decision was made 10 years ago. Martyn
Dirk