I used to use out: and err: labels but for the past few years my job has been to look at error handling every day. I now believe very strongly that do-nothing gotos are harmful. It's going to be my contribution to computer engineering to persuade people to hate exit labels. https://plus.google.com/106378716002406849458/posts/dnanfhQ4mHQ 1) "goto err;" is annoying to read because the name is meaningless. 2) Exit labels bad associations because code which uses err: or out: labels is often buggy as we have seen in pt_event_add(). 3) They don't do anything for return in the middle bugs. They only discourage people from returning at the start of the function where direct returns are fine. In theory, one place where they might be useful is if we added locking to a function later on. First of all, when we add locking no one ever changes the out: label to out_unlock:. It never happens. Also missing unlocks on error paths is sort of a sloppy/newbie mistake. I have looked through the git log and newbies are just as likely to get locking wrong when there is an exit label as when there is not. https://plus.google.com/106378716002406849458/posts/DfuAkt8szf2 4) Exit labels introduce a whole new class of "forgot to set the error code" bugs which don't happen with direct returns. regards, dan carpenter -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-janitors" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
