I would like to argue against the point being made throughout this thread that it makes multi-threading harder or impossible per se. Global variables are shared state, but the alternatives to globals (e. g. passing pointers around) might also share state. The problem with multi-threading is how to properly use shared state, not whether that state happens to be shared through a global variable or something else.
Most of the time when you do multi-threading you need to share something. In a producer-consumer pattern for example, you might share some thread-safe queue that contains the work units. And you are allowed to share it because that data structure is thread-safe. Whether that queue is global or not is completely irrelevant when it comes to thread-safety.
The implied hope expressed throughout this thread that transforming a program from single-threaded to multi-threaded will be easier when not using globals is naive. Yes, globals make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but there's a lot of ways to shoot yourself.
I'm not advocating globals, as the other points still stand, my point is merely that the number of threads in a program has nothing to do with variable scope.
