GOTO (Still) Considered Harmful

http://fexl.com/goto-considered-harmful

However, after discussing the issue on the cryptography mailing list, I realized that the really serious problem here was not the use of goto itself, but the lack of an obvious test case.

Clearly Apple did not have a single test case which made the SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange function call sslRawVerify. Since the whole point is to call sslRawVerify, this is an astounding omission in testing.

The "goto fail" pattern is common throughout OpenSSL. I of course think OpenSSL stinks to high heaven, but for reasons not directly related to "goto". I do think the use of "goto" gives off a bad "code smell" though.

I myself never use goto. When I'm writing code, I always create "if" or "while" blocks and then fill them in. It never even occurs to me to use goto.

My main objection to "goto", aside from the spaghetti code which might arise from it, though not necessarily, is that goto makes it difficult to refactor code.

Normally it's pretty easy to move a chunk of code into a separate function. However, if that code contains "goto", then you're pretty much stuck until you factor out the goto.