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Eh, they are just more command line arguments, ones that go on the left side of the command instead of the right. I guess an alternative is something the Windows registry, but I'm not seeing that as a great improvement since it's less direct.

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Command-line arguments aren't passed to subprocesseses, can't be inspected by arbitrary functions in the same process, and don't leak memory if they are changed.

Yes, I'm just highlighting that it's just as convenient to change them as command line parameters on a per-invocation basis. If there is a proposal for something else, it should retain this capability. Config files and something like the windows registry are much less convenient.

> can't be inspected by arbitrary functions in the same process

You can not really rely on that. The initial stack layout is well-defined at least on linux, so digging up argv is not difficult. Or just open /proc/self/cmdline

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