Memory management in C programs (2014)

I'm going to claim that the problem being solved here fundamentally comes from attempting to shoehorn early exit into an ancient codebase that wasn't designed for it, via longjmp. Exceptions can be a handy language feature, but plenty of modern code written in languages like C++ (whose exception support is often eschewed) and Go gets by without them. It just has to be written so that most functions manually propagate error codes they receive, potentially after manually unwinding some core…

Jesus Christ. Let the reader beware indeed. There are horrible suggestions here that will result in bad code if you think "Hey, that's a cool suggestion, I'll try that!". Or "Hey, I read in that blogpost this is OK in C, I'll do this". For instance: Stack allocation. It's seldom OK to use static variables even with accessor functions. Wrap the state that the functions operate in structs that you pass to functions. There are a few places where you…