Run time error with the DelphesPythia8 executable

[John Blue]

I am trying to run Pythia8 inside Delphes on the CentOS Linux 8 operating system. Both Pythia8 and Delphes were compiled with gcc version 8.3.1. After building Pythia, I built Delphes with

make HAS_PYTHIA8=true

I then tried to use one of the example files by running

./DelphesPythia8 cards/delphes_card_CMS.tcl examples/Pythia8/configNoLHE.cmnd delphes_nolhe.root

which yielded the error

double free or corruption (out)
Aborted (core dumped)

Some investigation suggested the error was occurring in delphes/readers/DelphesPythia8.cpp on line 375 with the function call

pythia->next()

I was able to fix the issue by changing the initialization of the pythia object as a null pointer

Pythia8::Pythia *pythia = 0;

to just initializing the object

Pythia8::Pythia pythia;

and then adjusting subsequent uses of the object as necessary.

If this seems like a reasonable fix, I can submit a pull request.