Environment Variable Guidelines WORK IN PROGRESS The following
material is a work in progress and should not be considered
complete or ready for public use. The runtime is affected by
certain environment variables. This guide attempts to set out
the conditions under which you should create environment
variables to control certain runtime behaviour, and what to call
them. In general environment variables exist in a single
namespace visible to a process as a whole. Given the single
namespace environment variables are best used to present
process-wide global values that affect the entire process. One
example of a process-wide global value would be the default
thread stack size if no other API is used to adjust the thread
stack size. If there is a process-wide global value that impacts
the runtime behaviour and it would be useful to change without
recompiling the application then this may be a candidate for
exposing through an environment variable. If there is a per-
thread, per-lock, per-critical-section, or othe