Goto is common for error out code in C. The code that uses that mentioned in the blog code is from the linux kernel, not any exploit code.

But please, for the love of god, can we not make this discussion thread an extended conversation on the merits or horrors of goto? Pretty please?

Goto is actually relatively common in C code. As in this case, it's usually used for error handling in much the same manner as exceptions might be. The document "/usr/src/linux/Documentation/CodingStyle" actually recommends such usage.

The reason why Linus Torvalds and others prefer to handle errors using goto is that it avoids the main branch of the code receiving an additional indentation, as it would if it were wrapped in a conditional. Not to do so would make the code less readable.

Note that these gotos are always local jumps (that is, they are in the same code block), at the same indentation level, and they are forward jumps (so the control flow is much the same as for a conditional). They are easy to understand and audit, and not similar to the goto examples that Dijkstra criticised for making code hard to reason about.

This. Also python's execeptions can be treated as limited goto's: http://docs.python.org/faq/design.html#why-is-there-no-goto

I addition what others have said, I'd emphasise that goto for error handling is fine in C, but in C++ it is usually unnecessary because C++ has exceptions and RAII.

Read the classics http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=171471433276813964...

meta: I don't see why it is necessary to downvote newbie questions on HN

Gotos are common in C for error handling because the other alternative of doing an if/then/else with all the error handling is so verbose. It's used to work around the lack of exceptions in C.

You still should not use gotos for regular control flow. And jumping backwards with goto is bad practice in most cases.