To be clear, these are not the "classically bad" go-to that Dijkstra &al. railed against. C's goto is restricted to local jumps. You'll rarely see a go-to used

To be clear, these are not the "classically bad" go-to that Dijkstra &al. railed against. C's goto is restricted to local jumps. You'll rarely see a go-to used in the classically bad style these days outside of something like a hand-written assembly interpreter main loop. As for why you'd want to write a goto where an if would be semantically equivalent, there's a mix of style and human-level semantics: gotos are for "exceptional" cases, so the "normal" case looks flat and falls though directly to unconditional code, keeping the main logic flow at a consistent indentation level. (And apparently this heuristic is also baked into simple branch predictors, though I doubt that's something that comes up nearly as much.)