[Emacspeak] Re: Crashes on macos on startup

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Isaac,

welcome to the list.

What version of Emacs and how did you install it on the mac?

What version of macOS are you running?

That error would indicate a problem in Emacs rather than Emacspeak.
There are various different ways of installing Emacs on the mac. I've
found the best results are with the railwaycat mac-port homebrew recipe
of Emacs. The mac-port version is a modified version of Emacs
specifically built for the mac. One of its nice features is that it has
a variable you can set to turn off voiceOver when running Emacs inside a
terminal. I would also ensure your using Emacs 27 and not current
development version 28.

It does look like a memory allocation problem. My biggest concern is
that this type of error is often associated with a hardware issue i.e.
bad membory. That may not be the case, but is a possibility. 

BTW which University are you studying at?

Tim

Isaac Leonard via Emacspeak <emacspeak(a)emacspeak.org> writes:

> Hi all, I am new to the mailing list and to mailing lists in general.
> I saw that I should introduce myself so here goes
> I am a 21 year old programmer from australia, I am totally blind  and
> have used emacspeak for around 2 years now.
> I am currently studying computer science at university and mainly use
> emacs for all of my writing when possible.
>
> I've recently had an issue with emacspeak crashing when I start emacs.
> A few months ago when version 53 was released I tried to upgrade however
> it caused emacs to crash on startup around 50% of the time.
> I reverted to version 52.0 until the other day when I decided to try
> upgrade again to version 54.0 and just deal with the crashes.
> Yesterday however I attempted to open emacs 4 times in a row with
> it crashing each time so decided to follow it up further.
> This only happens with emacspeak53.0 or 54.0, previous versions have
> never crashed before.
> Here is the errors printed to the terminal from when it crashed those 4 times :
> $emacs
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2360,0x700009d2e000) malloc: *** error for object
> 0x70000a5307e8: pointer being f
> reed was not allocated
> Fatal error 11: Segmentation fault
> Abort trap: 6
> $emacs
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2433,0x700003241000) malloc: *** error for object
> 0x7ffee6db5200: pointer being f
> reed was not allocated
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2433,0x10a8415c0) malloc: *** error for object
> 0x7ffee6db5310: pointer being free
> d was not allocated
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2433,0x700003241000) malloc: *** set a breakpoint
> in malloc_error_break to debug
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2433,0x10a8415c0) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in
> malloc_error_break to debug
> Fatal error 6: Abort trap
> Abort trap: 6
> $emacs
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2497,0x70000ce9d000) malloc: *** error for object
> 0x7ffee91b45a0: pointer being f
> reed was not allocated
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2497,0x70000ce9d000) malloc: *** set a breakpoint
> in malloc_error_break to debug
> Fatal error 4: Illegal instruction
> Abort trap: 6
> $emacs
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2576,0x700002fcd000) malloc: *** error for object
> 0x7ffee07fcac8: pointer being f
> reed was not allocated
> Emacs-x86_64-10_14(2576,0x700002fcd000) malloc: *** set a breakpoint
> in malloc_error_break to debug
> Fatal error 4: Illegal instruction
> Abort trap: 6
>
> Do you know if there is anything I can do to fix this or is it a bug in
> emacspeak?
> It seems to me as though it is attempting to access a freed object.
> Has anyone else had this issue?