Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

Pros and cons of global variables

To reiterate, a global variable is a variable that is declared outside of a function or class. Doing this makes our variable accessible in every function, hence us calling it global. When being taught programming in school, we were often told that global variables are a bad thing or at least, that modifying global variables in a function is considered to be poor programming practice.

There are numerous reasons why using global variables is a bad idea:

• Source code is the easiest to understand when the scope of the elements used is limited. Adding in global variables that can be read or modified anywhere in the program makes it much harder to keep track of where things are being done, as well as making it ...