zeallot | Variable assignment with zeal

For your first question, about *tmp* (and maybe related to your second question):

From Section 3.4.4 of the R Language definition:

Assignment to subsets of a structure is a special case of a general mechanism for complex assignment:

The whole design of the rational class seems built on preserving its type safety, and hiding implementation from users, which I can see would be necessary to get it to work consistently, but this means that you can't expect it to play nicely with R's default S3 methods.

The help file for vctrs specifically says

• dims(), dims<-, dimnames(), dimnames<-, levels(), and levels<- methods throw errors.

This suggests that the authors of vctrs didn't think it was a great base on which to build matrix methods.

In any case, I wouldn't be in such a hurry to try to get it into a matrix, since you can't do anything with it once it's there: there are no arithmetic methods available to you:

As @hplieninger suggests, the proximal problem is that the installation of broom is looking for the zeallot package, which isn't installed:

there is no package called 'zeallot'

You should try manually installing the zeallot package (install.packages("zeallot")) and then try installing tidyverse again.

It might also help to say "no" when R asks you whether you want to install the packages with more recent source-code versions from source rather than binary. (The worst thing that can happen is that you end up with slightly older versions of some packages.)

However it's surprising that this requirement comes up. Are you using install.packages("tidyverse")? Are you specifying something like dependencies=TRUE?

Because according to the CRAN index pages

• The current version of broom (0.5.4, apparently the same version that R is trying to install for you) doesn't directly import zeallot: it Depends only on R and

Imports: backports, dplyr, generics (≥ 0.0.2), methods, nlme, purrr, reshape2, stringr, tibble, tidyr

• The current version of zeallot shouldn't obviously be needed. The packages that use it are:

Reverse imports: completejourney, graphTweets, ipumsr, keras, mlflow, statsExpressions
Reverse suggests: listarrays, SDMtune, vctrs

The issue is due to a bug in the cli package. See here and here.

The development version of cli resolved this, and you can install it by running remotes::install_github("r-lib/cli").

There are alternatives to base R's proc.time() function. Two packages that have similar functions are

• microbenchmark, function get_nanotime().
• bench, function hires_time()

In this comment to the question the OP says that it is

Confirmed: hires_time() is > 10x faster on the Mac and Linux machines I have tried.

The tests below were run with R 3.6.1 on Ubuntu 19.04 and the results are not so drastic but bench::hires_time is the fastest of the three.

Ok, i will close this answer as i found the session been aborted by an R environment issue.

You can list named elements of a list to an environment:

If you cannot fix the source, then your only option is to contain the problem. If the calculations can be broken into smaller components, you have a few options

1. calculate what you can, save into .rda files, restart R, continue; or

2. use a parallelization scheme such as future or parallel::parLapplyLB to farm out the processing into subordinate R sessions, capture the output, and allow the child processes to close.