Hilarious, yes. Except this: "The followers advice is dropping the curly brackets for these one-line
ifs to make them all happy."
Did I just read a code review advocating for #gotofail, just to avoid a minor formatting nitpick?
Did I just read a code review advocating for #gotofail, just to avoid a minor formatting nitpick?
The fact that it's pretty much the most sane way to consistently handle errors in a complicated C program. In particular if you have multiple paths out of your function and it also makes memory allocations, that's an overcomplicated amount of free() calls you need to take care of, remember are there, and maintain as you add/remove allocations and failure paths. goto lets you keep it simple by only maintaining a single block of free()s at your function's single exit path.
Granted it seems this file is C++ and therefore the "going full RAII" option exists and could avoid goto in favor of exceptions or early returns... But if your code is C style that is a tough conversion to make, and not everybody buys into it equally.
The fail in #gotofail wasn't in using GOTO - it was a coding error, where a misindented line after a bracketless condition was always executed, when it should have been only executed inside the condition.
^^^ that part works
if (something) blah(); goto fail;
^^^ that part is written in a misleading way and doesn't do what it seems to do on first glance.
It is unfortunate that the problematic line contained a jump, because "#gotofail" seems to convey "GOTO considered harmful", while it's something completely unrelated. Ironic, really, given the actual meaning of "human looks at a block of text and misparses it."
if (some_cond) {
goto fail;
}
goto fail;
if (some_cond) {
goto fail;
}
if (some_cond) {
goto fail;
}
if (some_cond) {
goto fail;
}
OTOH, this tool will help you avoid a common pitfall with potentially disastrous consequences. A high-visibility vest for coding, if you will: won't save you from slipping or your head from falling objects, but neither is its purpose.
(Iterative bootstrapping is how we got from sharpened rocks to virtual machines, not by "meh, this minor improvement won't fix everything, so why bother.")