Having been only lightly exposed to MISRA, my impression is that in MISRA the "Required" label doesn't mean "You must always do this"; rather it means, "You mus

Having been only lightly exposed to MISRA, my impression is that in MISRA the "Required" label doesn't mean "You must always do this"; rather it means, "You must do this or document why it's necessary and safe not to do it". It's a bit like an operating system write-protecting pages. Sometimes you write-protect pages that the process really shouldn't write to, like shared libraries or something like that. But sometimes you write-protect pages that you actually expect a program to write to, like memory-mapped pages, because then when the write happens it triggers something else (like copy-on-write or marking a page dirty or something). Rules like "Don't use dynamically allocated memory" are one example of this -- not that they really expect you never to do it, but that marking it "Required" is a way to force you to document how you plan to make it safe. Similarly, if it's easier to rearrange a function to have only a single exit point than to explain why you need multiple exit points, just rearrange it; you really need multiple exit points, just document why.