The author, a Go developer returning to C after years away, discovered that reading John Carmack's notes on inlined code led to an epiphany about using goto as a clean error-handling pattern in C. They compare this approach to Go's defer and Zig's errdefer, which simplify resource cleanup when errors occur.
Background
The goto-for-cleanup pattern in C has a long history in systems programming, famously used in the Linux kernel. Modern languages like Go and Zig have adopted defer-style constructs that make this pattern unnecessary, but understanding it remains valuable for C developers.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Oct 29, 2026 at 12:07 AM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10