Deleting textures in opengl

Question

Do I have to delete all the textures I created (using glDeleteTextures) before the program exists, or does OpenGL delete the textures by himself?

Answer 1

Depending on what manages your OpenGL context, you may not need to delete the textures. For an example, see this question.

There does seem to be consensus, though, that it is good to clean up after yourself, but be careful when using C++ RAII to do so! If a C++ object that manages an OpenGL object via RAII is created or destroyed without an OpenGL context, undefined behavior will occur.

See: The Object Oriented Language Problem

The OpenGL API and OpenGL objects don't map intuitively to C++ OOP principles.

Answer 2

OpenGL resources are frees implicitly once all contexts with access to them are destroyed. OpenGL contexts of a process get destroyed when the client terminates; however in the case of indirect GLX context objects may be shared among X11 clients, so they may be freed only after the last client with access to them terminates.

Nevertheless it's always a good practice to clean up after yourself.