Sure. I don't believe it's too hard, it just means violating some of the premises people have been writing __del__ methods under. For instance, to clean up cycles nicely we might have to set some attributes to None before calling __del__, so you can't rely on attributes being meaningful anymore. However, this is already the case for global names; I've seen many people wonder about their __del__ method raising warnings (since exceptions are ignored) going, say, 'NoneType has no attribute 'registry'' when they try to un-register their class but the global registry has been cleaned up already. While we're at it, I would like for the new __del__ (which would probably have to be a new method) to disallow reviving self, just because it makes it unnecessarily complicated and it's rarely needed. Allowing a partially deleted object (or an object part of a partially deleted reference-cycle) to revive itself is not terribly useful, and there's no way to restore the rest of the cycle. I suggested a __dealloc__ method earlier in the thread to do this. I didn't think of allowing attributes to be cleared before calling the method, but I do believe that is necessary to allow, now that I've thought more about it.