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@lilfer lilfer commented Dec 15, 2025

PR summary

Closes #28513
Fixes a segmentation fault in the _macosx backend that occurs when closing figures.
In the original implementation of NavigationToolbar2, it relied on the window to hold the only strong reference to messagebox. The toolbar sometimes living longer than the window—and thus messagebox— resulted in the crash.
I'm still not sure why this crash seems to only occur when closing a figure that was created in the event loop.

Fix: NavigationToolbar2 now also retains messagebox.

I checked that messagebox is deallocated after a figure is closed and gc.collect() runs.

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@tacaswell tacaswell added this to the v3.11.0 milestone Dec 15, 2025
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Makes sense and I manually tested.

@greglucas greglucas merged commit 9e210e8 into matplotlib:main Dec 15, 2025
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Thanks @lilfer! If you're in macos backend bug squashing mode, there are several other similar reference counting issues hanging around I think if you have any ideas for those too: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3A%22GUI%3A%20MacOSX%22

@lilfer lilfer deleted the fix-macosx-toolbar-crash branch December 15, 2025 21:39
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[Bug]: Segfault when using close_event with macosx backend and tk

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