The main use case is not forgetting to free resources. It's when you do have resource-freeing code, but it's tricky to make sure you free only the resources you

The main use case is not forgetting to free resources. It's when you do have resource-freeing code, but it's tricky to make sure you free only the resources you know for sure you have already allocated. This is common in the Linux kernel. A great example is this function I found at random from fork.c: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/fork.c#L469 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/fork.c#... Notice that there are five different goto targets, each for a specific case of what has-and-has-not been allocated. The resources are memory, locks, and even TLB flushing. This code would probably be cleaner with defer.