Plots.jl with GR backend cause julia crash+hang

[smartinsightsfromdata]

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This problem has been reported to Plots and VSCODE.

With following code Plots.jl crashes and julia hangs. Julia 1.9.4 on Ubuntu 23.04 + vscode. The Boston housing dataset is very common and similar visualizations exist e.g. with Seaborn on Python and many packages in R. Everything works with 11 variables / columns but crashes with >11. As there are no problems in plotly, it may well be that the problem is centred on the gr() backend.

using DataFrames, Plots
using MLDatasets: BostonHousing

dataset = BostonHousing()
df = dataset.features;

df = df[:,1:12];

function correlogram(df)
    rows = cols = size(df,2)
    plots = []
    for row = 1:rows, col = 1:cols
        if row == col
            push!(
                plots,
                histogram(df[:,row],bins=10, xtickfont = font(5), ytickfont = font(5), legend = false))
        else
            push!(
                plots,
                scatter(df[:,row], df[:,col], xtickfont = font(5), ytickfont = font(5), legend = false, markersize=1, alpha = 0.3, smooth = true,
                linewidth=3, linecolor=:red),
            )
        end
    end
    plot(plots..., size=(1200, 1000), layout = (rows, cols))
end

correlogram(df)

Before dying julia display the following:

free(): invalid next size (normal)

[760418] signal (6.-6): Aborted
in expression starting at none:0

Please note:

• The problem occurs in VSCODE with the above error code. In jupyterlab the above code just hangs
• The problem occurs with gr backend. Plotly backend works in jupyterlab and VSCODE
• The code above works in the REPL

The problem has been reported to:

https://github.com/JuliaPlots/Plots.jl/issues/4856 https://github.com/JuliaPlots/StatsPlots.jl/issues/547 and https://github.com/julia-vscode/julia-vscode/issues/3518

(see in particular last comments form Plots and VSCODE maintainers, implying responsibility to the crash to GR...)

[jheinen]

The problem is fixed with this commit. A new GR release is expected in the next days.