Maybe I am not understanding this properly but java's threadlocal storage seems funky. Unlike in other non-java threading environments one cannot introspect a thread's local storage and retrieve the objects needed. To retrieve a thread local value one needs a reference to a ThreadLocal object which was used to create this TLS. This seems a bit funky; to retrieve a TLS value at a random point in that thread I need a reference to a global ThreadLocal object; so if I have to use a global object to grab TLS values I can just make my TLS values globals !

The only difference b/w globals and TLS is that the value of the TLS object can be unique per thread. This is cool but the inability to introspect a thread's TLS values without holding a global reference doesn't make sense. This stops me from using TLS where I am unable to add/modify globals for some reason (say I am writing callbacks for an established framework).

Ofcourse I probably didn't grok this right... maybe...