R 4.4.3: The 'future' package fails to install on Windows (=> CRAN issue => temporary workaround)

[tyholm]

I have attempted to install future on a Windows machine (R version 4.4.3) using install.packages and update.packages, as a prior version is already installed, but either attempt generates errors and the package does not install. These errors include...

Error in loadNamespace
ERROR: lazy loading failed for package 'future'
installation of package ‘future’ had non-zero exit status

Submitted syntax is install.packages("future").

I have not experienced any problems installing or updating any other packages.

[HenrikBengtsson]

Hello. To set the expectations, the future package should install out of the box - it's very well tested and it's very rare that someone experiencing problems installing the future package while other packages install just fine. So, my gut feeling here is that there's something going on with your R setup.

Error in loadNamespace
ERROR: lazy loading failed for package 'future'
installation of package ‘future’ had non-zero exit status

In order to give constructive feedback, I need more information. Specifically, what is the full output of:

> install.packages("future")

? I expect there are some useful clues in that output.

Also, is it just install.packages("future") that is problematic? Can you install other packages, e.g. install.packages("listenv")?

[tyholm]

Thank you.

All other packages install without any issues.

In what follows, I have removed any lines with system information.

install.packages("future")
--- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
also installing the dependency ‘parallelly’

There are binary versions available but the source versions are later:
binary source needs_compilation
parallelly 1.43.0 1.44.0 TRUE
future 1.40.0 1.49.0 FALSE

Binaries will be installed

Content type 'application/zip' length 601652 bytes (587 KB)
downloaded 587 KB

package ‘parallelly’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded binary packages are in

installing the source package ‘future’

Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 426921 bytes (416 KB) downloaded 416 KB

• installing source package 'future' ...
  ** package 'future' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
  ** using staged installation
  ** R
  ** demo
  ** inst
  ** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
  Error in loadNamespace(j <- i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[j]]) :
  namespace 'parallelly' 1.43.0 is being loaded, but >= 1.44.0 is required
  Calls: ... namespaceImportFrom -> asNamespace -> loadNamespace
  Execution halted
  ERROR: lazy loading failed for package 'future'

The downloaded source packages are in

Warning message:
In install.packages("future") :
installation of package ‘future’ had non-zero exit status

[HenrikBengtsson]

Thanks. This really helped. Before I forget, as a rule of thumb for troubleshooting R package installations is to try to narrow in on a particular package that causes the problem. In this case:

Error in loadNamespace(j <- i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[j]]) :
namespace 'parallelly' 1.43.0 is being loaded, but >= 1.44.0 is required

tells us that the parallelly package you've got installed is parallelly 1.43.0, but in order to install future you need parallelly 1.44.0. So, our first goal is to get that installed for you.

Now, this "should just work" automatically, but it doesn't. I dug around, and it turns out that there is an issue with CRAN. Something broken on their end and their pre-built package packages for Windows on R 4.4 stopped being updated on May 5, 2025 (source: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/4.4/_Info.txt). So, any R packages updated on CRAN since then are not available as pre-built binaries for R 4.4 on Windows. The parallelly 1.44.0 package was release two days after this. That is the source of your problems. I've reported this to CRAN - I think they'll fix this quite quickly, because this affects a lot of packages and Windows users.

In the meanwhile, I've made parallelly 1.44.0 (temporarily) available via R-universe. So, to install future, first install:

install.packages("parallelly", repos = c("https://futureverse.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org"))

That should install parallelly 1.44.0. After this, you should be able to install future with:

install.packages("future")

Thanks for reporting and bringing this to my attention. This was indeed a very unusual event - rarely seen on CRAN.

[tyholm]

That worked perfectly. Thank you!

[HenrikBengtsson]

FWIW, parallelly now installs out of the box again as usual - CRAN has fixed the glitch for R 4.4 on WIndows.