This seems fine, but I wonder how much effect it will have after code has loaded and cached the current $VERBOSE value. We don't do much caching of global variables right now, but we probably will in the coming months. Also, there's a lot of code out there that makes verbosity decisions early on and never looks at this variable again.

This seems fine, but I wonder how much effect it will have after code has loaded and cached the current $VERBOSE value.

The actual use-case, this came from, is actually setting up the runtime early.
But yeah it's a valid point, Although there's already a few places (within JRuby itself) doing a setVerbose.
Also while there's the RubyInstanceConfig the verbosity level cat only be controlled on the runtime, atm.

@kares Yeah that makes sense. I think it's a good change. If someone gets confused we can just explain that these values are frequently cached during post-boot startup by some libraries.