> In C, you have to be really careful with your flow control and memory allocations I was going to ask if an early return could still be called "early" if ther

> In C, you have to be really careful with your flow control and memory allocations I was going to ask if an early return could still be called "early" if there were resources to free, but I would say error checking after locking an object would still qualify (releasing the lock being necessary). C++ helps with this with RAII.