Hey everyone, I just encountered yet another reason to beware of __del__: when it's called during interpreter shutdown, for reasons which are kind of obvious in retrospect, if it calls notify() on a threading.Condition, the waiting thread may or may not ever actually receive it, and so if it does that and then tries to join() the thread the interpreter may hang in a hard-to-debug way.
This isn't something that can reasonably be fixed, and (like in most cases involving __del__) there's a very simple fix of using weakref.finalize instead. My question for the dev list: How would people feel about changing the documentation for the method <https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__del__> to more bluntly warn people against using it, and refer them to weakref.finalize and/or atexit.register as an alternative? The text already has an undertone of "lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate" but it may be helpful to be more explicit to avoid people getting caught in unexpected pitfalls. Yonatan
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