Having just written a truly repulsive preprocessor hack, I’m currently in my “maybe C++’s monster of a semantics is not that bad actually” phase (it is that bad

Having just written a truly repulsive preprocessor hack, I’m currently in my “maybe C++’s monster of a semantics is not that bad actually” phase (it is that bad though, so that’ll pass). C’s metaprogramming facilities are severely lacking. And yet— > Until C gets 'defer', the cleanest alternative is gotos. In an embedded setting, a given project is probably only ever targeting a single compiler, and given that in non-exotic situations it’s a vendor fork of GCC, you should be fine using GCC-specific features. And __attribute__((cleanup)) (essentially a block-scoped defer with cleanup code exiled to a separate function) has been in GCC since (checks docs) version 3.3, from 2003. It would have to be a truly spectacular vendor GCC fork to be missing that feature. (For reference, the year 2003 also saw the release of Linux kernel 2.6, as in two-six-zero.)