Best Practice for globals in clojure, (refs vs alter-var-root)?

I've found myself using the following idiom lately in clojure code. (def *some-global-var* (ref {})) (defn get-global-var [] @*global-var*) (defn update-global-var [val] (dosync (ref-set *global-var* val))) Most of the time this isn't even multi-threaded code that might need the transactional semantics that refs give you. It just feels like refs are for more than threaded code but basically for an