Comment by dmunoz

Many people are correctly citing the usage of goto in the Linux kernel. One thing I would like to add is what Greg Kroah-Hartman says about goto in one of his talks: only jump forward, never backwards. This is precisely what you do when you goto cleanup.

I, personally, think the pattern is clean. A labelled break is basically a goto anyway, yet not always available in your language. I never liked needing a flag to exit some nested structure early. I don't find reading that clean at all.

Also, a minor rant here: Dijkstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" is often mentioned, sometime wordlessly, when goto is brought up, but it seems many of those people misunderstood what was actually being argued. Although he mentions being "convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all 'higher level' programming languages," his main gripe was that the "unbridled use of the go to statement has an immediate consequence that it becomes terribly hard to find a meaningful set of coordinates in which to describe the process progress." He felt it was "as it stands is just too primitive; it is too much an invitation to make a mess of one's program." So, as others have pointed out already, his main issue was with goto being used in a way that resulted in unstructured, hard to understand programs.