RStudio desktop crashing on Mac immediately after launch

Hi everyone,

I have read some similar posts (such as here and here), but I have not yet found a solution to my problem yet.

Description of crash
RStudio keeps immediately crashing when I try to launch the app. Without doing anything, I get this message:

"R encountered a fatal error.
The session was terminated."

Then, after I click "okay" on the fatal error message, I get another message that pops up that just says "null."

As I can't actually use RStudio at all, I can't print the session info or anything like that.

System information
RStudio 1.4.1717
RStudio desktop edition
R version 4.0.5 (2021-03-31) -- "Shake and Throw"
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
macOS Mojave, version 10.14.6

Steps taken to solve the issue
I have basically gone through all of the steps listed here. More specifically:

  1. Check the version of R: see above.
  2. Check for Startup files: I made sure that there weren't any .Rprofile, .Renviron, or .RData in my working directory (or any R Project folders).
  3. RStudio cannot find R: when I type " Sys.which("R") " into the R console, I get " "/usr/local/bin/R" ". I guess that is fine?
  4. Check firewall, proxy settings, and antimalware: This is mostly not applicable, but I did add localhost and 127.0.0.1 to the list of approved Hosts and Domains.
  5. Check the permissions on the ~/.rstudio-desktop directory: I don't really know how to do this and the directions are not clear.
  6. Reset RStudio's state: This initially worked a few weeks ago when I first had this problem. Now, it doesn't seem to work. In the terminal, I get the message "Directory not empty" now.

I have tried to obtain the crash report as described here, but that did not work.

I also tried to deal with potential rendering issues as described here, but again, I have not had any luck so far.

One more detail I will note (in case it is relevant) is that the last thing in the RStudio console that is shown before the crash pop-ups is this:

Registered S3 method overwritten by 'pryr':
method from
print.bytes Rcpp

All of these crashing issues began when I tried to download packages related to rstan and a few other Bayesian packages. Maybe Rcpp was downloaded at that time too? I can't quite remember, but I thought I may as well mention that the instant crashes started after trying to load a suite of packages and their dependencies. At the time, I reset RStudio's state and I didn't load those packages at all and everything seemed fine. Now, the crashes have started again even though I have not tried to load the packages. I was simply using lmer and ggplot, it crashed, and now it keeps crashing.

Any help would be deeply appreciated.

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