10 Mar
2023
10 Mar
'23
8:04 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 1:55 PM Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
That’s my point. Both break structure.
Just hinding the break with some construct that isn’t “goto” doesn’t
make it acceptable.
The alternative is often worse, though. I'd take a well-aimed goto or
a nested break over a bunch of conditionals in the bodies of loops any
day, both in terms of readability and performance.
That said, I'm not a huge fan of the `goto fail;` pattern. Apple had a
pretty major bug with that, and I find that many, many times it can be
replaced with a restructuring of the code. For example, perhaps do
your allocation, call a function and capture the return value (passing
the allocated resources as arguments), and then de-allocate and return
the cached return value. Let the compiler optimize it.
As an experiment, I rewrote the Apple bug code (which was open source)
to do that and it was cleaner and simpler than the original. Someone I
showed it to said, "but what, are you going to do that for _every_
function that can fail?" Well no, but generally you don't have to; we
fixate too much on the general problem and ignore the specifics.
- Dan C.