[Kamailio-Devel] Use of goto

[Henning Westerholt]

On Tuesday 27 January 2009, Johansson Olle E wrote:
> I've been spending some time going through the mi_* modules for
> doxygen and other format changes, as well as checking spelling of log
> messages and docs.
>
> I see a lot of code with goto's that isn't needed and can be changed.
> Most common is "goto error" where error just is one line that returns
> an error code. This can simply be changed so that the "goto error" is
> replaced with "return <errorcode>;"
>
> I don't know your code guidelines, but this code would not be approved
> in Asterisk. We're trying to simplify code paths as much as possible
> to make things easier to understand and follow. Overuse of goto
> doesn't make code easy to read, in my opinion...

Hi Olle,

in my opinion the use of 'goto' should as much avoided as possible, exactly 
because the same reason, making the code easier to understand. If the goto is 
only used to return one error code, it could be changed. It make more sense 
when the error handling is more complex, e.g. freeing more then two instances 
of allocated memory, unlocking of resources or similar. Then it makes the 
code more compact, as the cleanups only happens in one place.

The other arguments for gotos like breaking out from several innner loops, or 
performance in _really_ hot code paths are valid, but probably applies really 
rarely.

Cheers,

Henning