You almost always only want to implement __del__ if you're writing an extension in C. Otherwise, the GC generally takes care of cleanup perfectly fine. And in

You almost always only want to implement __del__ if you're writing an extension in C. Otherwise, the GC generally takes care of cleanup perfectly fine. And in cases like the one cjhanks describes, __del__ doesn't get called reliably enough. In those cases, using a contextmanager is better.