Rehabilitating C's goto

I admit - I regularly write goto's. Actually almost all non-pure functions see at least one goto. For always the same reason: Handling errors and cleaning up resources. I already wrote about the technique 1 1/2 year ago.

Example For Error Handling And Cleanup using goto [1]

In my eyes the usage of goto for cleanup and error handling is a good thing. The flow of application logic is not unnecessarily cluttered with local error handling. Instead the function is divided into two parts: The upper part which contains the application logic and the lower part which contains the error handling and the cleanup of resources.

However, using these goto's always left me feel like doing something in the gray zone: There is an old ban from the 60ies (Letters to the Editor: Go To Statement Considered Harmful, Dijkstra, 1968) but without talking to much about it in public C programmers still carry on writing goto.

The paper An Empirical Study of goto in C Code  releases as a pre-print in February 2015 now takes an interesting second look at this old ban.

The international group of researches who was involved in the paper analyzed 2 million lines of C code collected from 11K Github repositories. I leave the reading of the entire paper up to you and jump directly to the important part of the conclusion:

...far from being maintenance nightmares, most usages of goto follow disciplined, well-designed usage patterns, that are handled by specific constructs in more modern languages. 
The most common pattern are error-handling and cleanup, for which exception handling constructs exist in most modern languages, but not in C. Even properties such as several goto statements jumping to the same label have benefits, such as reducing code duplication, in spite of the coordinate problem described by Dijkstra.

That sounds like good news to me - I eventually can exit the gray zone.