The Lifecycle of a ModernGL Object

Note

Future version of ModernGL might support different GC models. It’s an area currently being explored.

Releasing Objects

Objects in moderngl don’t automatically release the OpenGL resources it allocated. Each type has a release() method that needs to be called to properly clean up everything:

# Create a texture
texture = ctx.texture((10, 10), 4)

# Properly release the opengl resources
texture.release()

# Ensure we don't keep the object around
texture = None

This comes as a surprise for most people, but there are a number of reasons moderngl have chosen this approach. Unless you are doing headless rendering we don’t even “own” the context itself. It’s the window library creating the context for us and we simply detect it. We don’t really know exactly when this context is destroyed. There are also other more complicated situations such as contexts with shared resources.

You can create your own __del__ methods in wrappers if needed, but keep in mind that moderngl types cannot be extended. They only have an extra attribute that can contain anything.

Detecting Released Objects

If you for some reason need to detect if a resource was released it can be done by checking the type of the internal moderngl object (.mglo property):

>> import moderngl
>> ctx = moderngl.create_standalone_context()
>> buffer = ctx.buffer(reserve=1024)
>> type(buffer.mglo)
<class 'mgl.Buffer'>
>> buffer.release()
>> type(buffer.mglo)
<class 'mgl.InvalidObject'>
>> type(buffer.mglo) == moderngl.mgl.InvalidObject
True