Goto fail

    if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)
        goto fail;
        goto fail;

C and C++ really don't have an excuse for not MANDATING compiler warnings at a minimum. The use of lack of bracing is "I'm too lazy and much too cool to type 2 characters." This is major fuckup number 4,294,967,294 So that muppets who keep claiming "We need backwards compatibility with brittle and broken code." Should probably spend about a decade in the room full of mirrors HAVING A GOOD LONG, HARD LOOK AT THEMSELVES. (Caps used advisedly, in this case, we need to do a bit of yelling at these standards committee weenies refusing to, you know, fix the damn bugs in the standard).

Edit to point out this how how the NSA MITM'd you when you were using OSX, in case you missed what the file is too.

I'm working on some ffmpeg code at the moment. ffmpeg 2.0 contains 554 occurrences of "goto fail".

Edit: okay, it appears that the point of OP's post is that someone appears to have copy/pasted an extra "goto fail" at line 631, short circuiting the remainder of the SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange function and needlessly jumping to fail. I assume this was the code that Apple needed to patch in iOS 7.0.6 today?

This file is one of them: multiple branches that can end to the same leaf.

Another would be break in interlocked loops, or clean failing when the software detect an hard failure and no memory can be used anymore.

For this last case, you can also prepare some error handling frames at the init, and longjump (like a goto, but with already allocated stack memory) when it's time to fail.

In the C programming language, "goto fail" is a perfectly acceptable means of (function local) error handling because of the absence of any kind of exceptions (setjmp doesn't count). Just look at any significant C program, and you'll see that this is used a lot. The alternative for "goto fail" is duplicating the clean up code for each and every error condition that happens in the function.

Blindly following advice like "goto is bad" and applying it everywhere is a bad idea. You should try to understand the reasoning behind it.

You should not use goto for control flow if possible, but it's not bad practice to use "goto fail" for cleaning up on error conditions.

[1] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/437182770754752513