GLOBAL_VARIABLES_PACKAGE

const GLOBAL_VARIABLES_PACKAGE: IEnginePackage;

Defined in: packages/engine/src/packages/globals/GlobalVariablesPackage.ts:38

global :name, a variable that spans documents, backed by the shared GlobalVariableStore rather than the VM’s own local scope.

Deliberately a separate package from solve-variables, which owns the ordinary :name = expr local. The two are different levels of functionality, and separating them is what lets a host refuse one without losing the other: everything in this package reaches outside the document being evaluated, and a host may have good reason to disallow that (a single-document editor, a sandboxed evaluation, a product where one document reaching into another would be surprising) while still wanting ordinary variables, which are the far lower-risk primitive.

While both lived in one package, the documented way to drop a feature, BUILTIN_PACKAGES.filter((p) => p !== VARIABLES_PACKAGE), took :x = 1 down with global :x = 1, and there was no supported way to refuse only the document-spanning half. A host that wanted one had to register a replacement parselet for the GLOBAL token and rely on last-one-wins.

Dropping this package removes the SYNTAX, not the values: the store is realm-wide and outlives any one engine, so anything another engine has already written is still there, merely unaddressable from this one. That asymmetry is a consequence of the store being a module-level singleton and is resolved by the workspace in docs-internal/plans/CROSS_SCOPE_CELLS.md, after which refusing the feature is simply declining to pass a workspace.

The global keyword itself is claimed by the locale (constants/locales) regardless of whether this package is registered, so a document containing global :x without it does not silently evaluate to something else: the GLOBAL token has no prefix parselet and the line reports a parse error, contained to that line.