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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.

Say it's a socket and you want to send some sort of "END_OF_STREAM" message before closing.

That wouldn't work if you expected __del__ to cleanup lock files or temp files or to manage other external resources.

If this were the case, there would be no need for SIGTERM. The OS doesn't know the application logic and can't guarantee clean termination from the application's perspective.

As others have said, there's rarely reason to override `__del__`, and when you do you know exactly why you need it.

The python interpreter can choose not to call it. I've had to register essential cleanup with `atexit` instead.