gotoThe goto statement is universally revered and can be here presented without contest.
Just kidding! Over the years, there has been a lot of back-and-forth over whether or not (often not) goto is considered harmful175.
In this programmer’s opinion, you should use whichever constructs leads to the best code, factoring in maintainability and speed. And sometimes this might be goto!
In this chapter, we’ll see how goto works in C, and then check out some of the common cases where it is used176.
In this example, we’re going to use goto to skip a line of code and jump to a label. The label is the identifier that can be a goto target—it ends with a colon (:).
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
printf("One\n");
printf("Two\n");
goto skip_3;
printf("Three\n");
skip_3:
printf("Five!\n");
}The output is:
One
Two
Five!goto sends execution jumping to the specified label, skipping everything in between.
You can jump forward or backward with goto.
infinite_loop:
print("Hello, world!\n");
goto infinite_loop;Labels are skipped over during execution. The following will print all three numbers in order just as if the labels weren’t there:
printf("Zero\n");
label_1:
label_2:
printf("One\n");
label_3:
printf("Two\n");
label_4:
printf("Three\n");As you’ve noticed, it’s common convention to justify the labels all the way on the left. This increases readability because a reader can quickly scan to find the destination.
Labels have function scope. That is, no matter how many levels deep in blocks they appear, you can still goto them from anywhere in the function.
It also means you can only goto labels that are in the same function as the goto itself. Labels in other functions are out of scope from goto’s perspective. And it means you can use the same label name in two functions—just not the same label name in the same function.
continueIn some languages, you can actually specify a label for a continue statement. C doesn’t allow it, but you can easily use goto instead.
To show the issue, check out continue in this nested loop:
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++) {
printf("%d, %d\n", i, j);
continue; // Always goes to next j
}
}As we see, that continue, like all continues, goes to the next iteration of the nearest enclosing loop. What if we want to continue in the next loop out, the loop with i?
Well, we can break to get back to the outer loop, right?
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++) {
printf("%d, %d\n", i, j);
break; // Gets us to the next iteration of i
}
}That gets us two levels of nested loop. But then if we nest another loop, we’re out of options. What about this, where we don’t have any statement that will get us out to the next iteration of i?
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++) {
for (int k = 0; k < 3; k++) {
printf("%d, %d, %d\n", i, j, k);
continue; // Gets us to the next iteration of k
break; // Gets us to the next iteration of j
????; // Gets us to the next iteration of i???
}
}
}The goto statement offers us a way!
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++) {
for (int k = 0; k < 3; k++) {
printf("%d, %d, %d\n", i, j, k);
goto continue_i; // Now continuing the i loop!!
}
}
continue_i: ;
}We have a ; at the end there—that’s because you can’t have a label pointing to the plain end of a compound statement (or before a variable declaration).
When you’re super nested in the middle of some code, you can use goto to get out of it in a manner that’s often cleaner than nesting more ifs and using flag variables.
// Pseudocode
for(...) {
for (...) {
while (...) {
do {
if (some_error_condition)
goto bail;
} while(...);
}
}
}
bail:
// Cleanup hereWithout goto, you’d have to check an error condition flag in all of the loops to get all the way out.
breakThis is a very similar situation to how continue only continues the innermost loop. break also only breaks out of the innermost loop.
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++) {
printf("%d, %d\n", i, j);
break; // Only breaks out of the j loop
}
}
printf("Done!\n");But we can use goto to break farther:
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++) {
printf("%d, %d\n", i, j);
goto break_i; // Now breaking out of the i loop!
}
}
break_i:
printf("Done!\n");If you’re calling multiple functions to initialize multiple systems and one of them fails, you should only de-initialize the ones that you’ve gotten to so far.
Let’s do a fake example where we start initializing systems and checking to see if any returns an error (we’ll use -1 to indicate an error). If one of them does, we have to shutdown only the systems we’ve initialized so far.
if (init_system_1() == -1)
goto shutdown;
if (init_system_2() == -1)
goto shutdown_1;
if (init_system_3() == -1)
goto shutdown_2;
if (init_system_4() == -1)
goto shutdown_3;
do_main_thing(); // Run our program
shutdown_system4();
shutdown_3:
shutdown_system3();
shutdown_2:
shutdown_system2();
shutdown_1:
shutdown_system1();
shutdown:
print("All subsystems shut down.\n");Note that we’re shutting down in the reverse order that we initialized the subsystems. So if subsystem 4 fails to start up, it will shut down 3, 2, then 1 in that order.
Kinda. For recursive functions only.
If you’re unfamiliar, Tail Call Optimization (TCO)177 is a way to not waste stack space when calling other functions under very specific circumstances. Unfortunately the details are beyond the scope of this guide.
But if you have a recursive function you know can be optimized in this way, you can make use of this technique. (Note that you can’t tail call other functions due to the function scope of labels.)
Let’s do a straightforward example, factorial.
Here’s a recursive version that’s not TCO, but it can be!
#include <stdio.h>
#include <complex.h>
int factorial(int n, int a)
{
if (n == 0)
return a;
return factorial(n - 1, a * n);
}
int main(void)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
printf("%d! == %ld\n", i, factorial(i, 1));
}To make it happen, you can replace the call with two steps:
goto a label on the first line of the function.Let’s try it:
#include <stdio.h>
int factorial(int n, int a)
{
tco: // add this
if (n == 0)
return a;
// replace return by setting new parameter values and
// goto-ing the beginning of the function
//return factorial(n - 1, a * n);
int next_n = n - 1; // See how these match up with
int next_a = a * n; // the recursive arguments, above?
n = next_n; // Set the parameters to the new values
a = next_a;
goto tco; // And repeat!
}
int main(void)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
printf("%d! == %d\n", i, factorial(i, 1));
}I used temporary variables up there to set the next values of the parameters before jumping to the start of the function. See how they correspond to the recursive arguments that were in the recursive call?
Now, why use temp variables? I could have done this instead:
a *= n;
n -= 1;
goto tco;and that actually works just fine. But if I carelessly reverse those two lines of code:
n -= 1; // BAD NEWS
a *= n;—now we’re in trouble. We modified n before using it to modify a. That’s Bad because that’s not how it works when you call recursively. Using the temporary variables avoids this problem even if you’re not looking out for it. And the compiler likely optimizes them out, anyway.
This is outside the spec, but commonly seen in Unix-like systems.
Certain long-lived system calls might return an error if they’re interrupted by a signal, and errno will be set to EINTR to indicate the syscall was doing fine; it was just interrupted.
In those cases, it’s really common for the programmer to want to restart the call and try it again.
retry:
byte_count = read(0, buf, sizeof(buf) - 1); // Unix read() syscall
if (byte_count == -1) { // An error occurred...
if (errno == EINTR) { // But it was just interrupted
printf("Restarting...\n");
goto retry;
}Many Unix-likes have an SA_RESTART flag you can pass to sigaction() to request the OS automatically restart any slow syscalls instead of failing with EINTR.
Again, this is Unix-specific and is outside the C standard.
That said, it’s possible to use a similar technique any time any function should be restarted.
goto and Thread PreemptionThis example is ripped directly from Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, another excellent book from like-minded authors who also feel that quality books should be free to download. Not that I’m opinionated, or anything.
retry:
pthread_mutex_lock(L1);
if (pthread_mutex_trylock(L2) != 0) {
pthread_mutex_unlock(L1);
goto retry;
}
save_the_day();
pthread_mutex_unlock(L2);
pthread_mutex_unlock(L1);There the thread happily acquires the mutex L1, but then potentially fails to get the second resource guarded by mutex L2 (if some other uncooperative thread holds it, say). If our thread can’t get the L2 lock, it unlocks L1 and then uses goto to cleanly retry.
We hope our heroic thread eventually manages to acquire both mutexes and save the day, all while avoiding evil deadlock.
goto and Variable ScopeWe’ve already seen that labels have function scope, but weird things can happen if we jump past some variable initialization.
Look at this example where we jump from a place where the variable x is out of scope into the middle of its scope (in the block).
goto label;
{
int x = 12345;
label:
printf("%d\n", x);
}This will compile and run, but gives me a warning:
warning: ‘x’ is used uninitialized in this functionAnd then it prints out 0 when I run it (your mileage may vary).
Basically what has happened is that we jumped into x’s scope (so it was OK to reference it in the printf()) but we jumped over the line that actually initialized it to 12345. So the value was indeterminate.
The fix is, of course, to get the initialization after the label one way or another.
goto label;
{
int x;
label:
x = 12345;
printf("%d\n", x);
}Let’s look at one more example.
{
int x = 10;
label:
printf("%d\n", x);
}
goto label;What happens here?
The first time through the block, we’re good. x is 10 and that’s what prints.
But after the goto, we’re jumping into the scope of x, but past its initialization. Which means we can still print it, but the value is indeterminate (since it hasn’t been reinitialized).
On my machine, it prints 10 again (to infinity), but that’s just luck. It could print any value after the goto since x is uninitialized.
goto and Variable-Length ArraysWhen it comes to VLAs and goto, there’s one rule: you can’t jump from outside the scope of a VLA into the scope of that VLA.
If I try to do this:
int x = 10;
goto label;
{
int v[x];
label:
printf("Hi!\n");
}I get an error:
error: jump into scope of identifier with variably modified typeYou can jump in ahead of the VLA declaration, like this:
int x = 10;
goto label;
{
label: ;
int v[x];
printf("Hi!\n");
}Because that way the VLA gets allocated properly before its inevitable deallocation once it falls out of scope.