Global Variables

By default, V does not allow global variables. However, for low-level code, it can be useful to have global variables.

For this purpose, you can enable global variables with the compiler flag -enable-globals.

Global variables declared with __global ( ... ):

__global ( sem sync.Semaphore float = 20.0 )

An initializer for global variables must be explicitly converted to the desired target type. If no initializer is given a default initialization is done.

Some objects like semaphores and mutexes require an explicit initialization in place, i.e. not with a value returned from a function call but with a method call by reference.

A separate init() function can be used for this purpose – it will be called before main():

import sync __global ( sem sync.Semaphore // needs initialization in `init()` mtx sync.RwMutex // needs initialization in `init()` f1 = f64(34.0625) // explicily initialized shmap shared map[string]f64 // initialized as empty `shared` map f2 f64 // initialized to `0.0` ) fn init() { sem.init(0) mtx.init() }

Be aware that in multithreaded applications the access to global variables is subject to race conditions. There are several approaches to deal with these:

use shared types for the variable declarations and use lock blocks for access. This is most appropriate for larger objects like structs, arrays, or maps.
handle primitive data types as atomics using special C-functions.
use explicit synchronization primitives like mutexes to control access. The compiler cannot really help in this case, so you have to know what you are doing.
do not care – this approach is possible, but it makes only sense if the exact values of global variables do not really matter. An example can be found in the rand module where global variables are used to generate (non-cryptographic) pseudo random numbers. In this case, data races lead to random numbers in different threads becoming somewhat correlated, which is acceptable considering the performance penalty that using synchronization primitives would represent.