It's not uncommon in C as an alternative to exceptions. You don't want to be using it for every-day flow control, but when you're checking results from syscalls

It's not uncommon in C as an alternative to exceptions. You don't want to be using it for every-day flow control, but when you're checking results from syscalls repeatedly, using a gigantic nested if-else chain would get more messy than using goto. The other alternative is early return/exit calls, but then you have to remember to clean up everything each time before you return/exit.