Would you prefer using del or reassigning to None (garbage collecting)

Question

Consider following code:

if value and self.fps_display is None:
    self.fps_display = clock.ClockDisplay()
elif not value and self.fps_display is not None:
         


        

Answer 1

There is no difference for garbage collection — in both cases a reference to object pointed to by self.fps_display will be released. Which one you should use depends on whether you want the name to still exist (albeit now pointing to a different object, None), or not.