mongrel2

I just clicked on that - here was what the top comment had to say about Zed: "Zed is known as one of the most prolific and capable software engineers around and I have heard his C code for Mongrel 2 server https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2 described as being amongst some of the best examples of C code to study, learn and understand (trying to find the link that said that). I hold his work in high regard."

That's not really the best example of using goto's, as that code is generated from this file: https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2/blob/master/src/http11/h... A nicer example of the use of goto's in Mongrel2 is the check macro: https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2/blob/a884aef0f4a460e130d... The convention of the project is that every function that has to deal with an error condition has an "error" label. These macro a used to jump to that label to clean up the function before returning. Here's an example: https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2/blob/a884aef0f4a460e130d... I think that this use of gotos is more clear than the alternative of a lot of nested if statements checking for success or having the clean up logic duplicated in a lot of places.

As someone who occasionally dabbles in C code, I am interested in knowing what is the modern take on `goto`s. I know they are "harmful" but I often come across code riddled with goto statements [1] and I personally feel that as long as it makes the code readable without significantly obfuscating the logic, goto is a perfectly fine way of doing things (although popular opinion and consideration for best practices have more or less forced me to remove goto from my list of C tools). Also, the fact that it maps almost directly to asm makes it easier to reason about the generated machine code (although if that's a significant reason for using goto is questionable). [1] https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2/blob/master/src/http11/h...; Zed Shaw's Mongrel2 server code linked to in another thread.

>>Let me start by saying that unlike Mr. Shaw, I am not a writer. I'm an engineer. Zed Shaw, whilst his approach to certain issues may be questionable, is not "a writer rather than an engineer". Zed is known as one of the most prolific and capable software engineers around and I have heard his C code for Mongrel 2 server https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2 described as being amongst some of the best examples of C code to study, learn and understand (trying to find the link that said that). I hold his work in high regard. I don't agree with everything that Zed does and think it's a pity that his combative and dogmatic nature detracts from the core message about his work, but the author of this blog post is off track if he is trying to suggest that Zed doesn't know what he is doing and is "a writer" rather than "a software engineer". Zed is

I've never used mongrel2, but I've drooled a bit over it. They have a 'mp3stream' example at https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2/blob/master/examples/mp3...