Julia crash + hangs with large Plots.jl plot

[smartinsightsfromdata]

This issue was originally reported as a Plots issue here JuliaPlots/Plots.jl#4856

As I was able to render the graph in the REPL, it is now clear that the issue is with VSCODE.

Strangely though it happens with the GR backend but NOT with the Plotly backend.

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

I originally found the problem with StatsPlots and reported JuliaPlots/StatsPlots.jl#547 , but also in this case the plots works in the REPL and crashes + hangs with VSCODE.

[pfitzseb]

Try exporting the plot as a png or svg outside of VS Code. I'd expect that to error as well because we're not really doing anything besides that.

[smartinsightsfromdata]

@pfitzseb how do you explain it works with plotly backend and crashes with gr?

[pfitzseb]

I mean, plotly appears to serialize things fine and GR doesn't. It's entirely different code doing the conversion to a vector or pixel graphics format.