I'm sick of these app developers assuming that using "goto" is bad practice. The fact is that "goto" is used plenty in great production code you're probably running right now.[1] I'd like to know a cleaner way to abort a function into its cleanup phase when a function call returns an error. And "goto" statements are extremely simple to handle for even the most naive of compilers.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle (see chapter 7)
Of course exceptions are suboptimal; bad performance compared to "goto" can have unintended side effects depending upon the OS (scheduling work may be triggered off of the additional interrupt).
My statement was based on ideology as I doubt typical UNIX kernel coders would ever allow for exceptions, given that C does not support them and is against the UNIX way.
> Of course exceptions are suboptimal; bad performance compared to "goto" can have unintended side effects depending upon the OS (scheduling work may be triggered off of the additional interrupt).
Exceptions at the kernel level are possible, Windows does it for certain classes of errors, for example.
Some other commercial or research kernels might do it as well.