There have been a bunch of major security vulnerabilities due to mistakes involving GOTO in C, being used as suggested by the article. Here’s a memorable one: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html
The problem was not goto, it was that the else path was also “give up”. In a non goto/RAII/defer language it would have been something like
If (error)
Return
Return
But again the error was not the goto, and believing it was is the exact problem the article is talking about: people are so opposed to goto they are unable to see real issues (I have seen C code that tries to avoid goto completely and error handling code becomes horrific, far more complex, and far more error prone that just using goto). The problem with goto is that it is very easy to use it unnecessarily, in ways that complicated control flow but don’t actually make things better.
Many people seem to really dislike using the brackets but this is what that gets you.
Interestingly (or perhaps coming full circle), the bug reference by the GGP comment is also called out in the GCC 6.1 release notes:
> -Wmisleading-indentation warns about places where the indentation of the code gives a misleading idea of the block structure of the code to a human reader. For example, given CVE-2014-1266
sslKeyExchange.c: In function 'SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange':
sslKeyExchange.c:629:3: warning: this 'if' clause does not guard... [-
Wmisleading-indentation]
if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)
^~
sslKeyExchange.c:631:5: note: ...this statement, but the latter is misleadingly indented as if it is guarded by the 'if'
goto fail;
^~~~Which is most frightening to me.
Pyhon would have prevented this bug, but so would a formatter. Rust also requires braces for if-blocks to prevent this kind of error.
Using a language feature that is a known footgun (`if ...` instead of `if {...}`) without being cautious enough to avoid shooting yourself in the foot is not the fault of the footgun, it's the fault of the programmer.
Additionally, in the above linked case, the problem isn't a misused `goto`, it's a misused `if ...`. It would be just as problematic if they typed `cleanup_context();` instead of `goto fail;`, but nobody complains about cleaning up state, do they?