As others have pointed out, this is actually idiomatic C. You have a portion of your function below a label which is "clean up everything and return this variab

As others have pointed out, this is actually idiomatic C. You have a portion of your function below a label which is "clean up everything and return this variable (usually error status)." Then at any point where you have an error, you goto that label and everything is released and the error gets returned. It's sort of a manual 'defer' pattern. "goto considered harmful" is taken out of context and bemoaned mostly by people unfamiliar with idiomatic C, I think. (Edit: sorry, I mean just for C. For other languages, e.g. Go, there may be more appropriate patterns like the 'defer' keyword.)