Emacspeak / emacs 27.x on crashes on Mac OS Big Sur

[Victor Tsaran <vtsaran@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone!

I just upgraded to Mac OS Big Sur one of my machines at home and am encountering unrecoverable crashes when running the Emacs binary app with Emacspeak. Basically, as soon as I start emacs and hear the Emacspeak's startup sound, Emacs completely crashes with a "memory allocation" error.

Things I tried:

1. Removing Emacspeak from the init.el to see if the crash is specific to Emacs. When Emacspeak lines are removed, the crash goes away, Emacs starts up just fine with no errors in the logs (that I can see).

2. Running the "Mac" TTS server on its own using Python console. I am able to communicate with the server by dispatching speech strings.

3. Searching the web to see if there are any known issues with Emacs 27 running as binary (homebrew's cask build, to be specific). I cannot find anything out of the ordinary.

4. Downloading the source code for Emacs from Github and building the Mac binary from it. As soon as the app starts, the crash reoccurs, as described above.

I am trying to understand Mac OS's crashlog but, to be honest with you, it's a bit above my head! It's clear the crash has to do with memory allocation and object pointer not being freed, but I can't figure out what could be causing the above. I can only see the parent process, which is Emacs, but nothing underneath. There are threads being discussed in the logs, but like I said, this is beyond my knowledge of Mac OS's internals.

Is there anyone on the list who:

1. is running Emacs / Emacspeak combo on Mac OS Big Sur, preferably using Homebrew Cask build?

2. is willing to look into and help me debug the crashlog?

3. has any other suggestions I can try?

Thanks a lot for reading this long post and for any ideas.

Best,

Victor

PS Please do not recommend I use the non-GUI version of Emacs. :)