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by snovv_crash 3445 days ago
If you are writing high-reliability C (think military, aerospace, industrial control systems), early return is usually prohibited by coding standards. Then again, dynamic memory allocation usually is too.

Personally, I think early return is lazy programming because not cleaning up non-RAII objects is only one class of bugs that it can introduce. Things like vector renormalization, update notification and even later sections of algorithms can all be missed by early return. Not having early return means you need to explicitly skip later code if you don't want it, rather than essentially turning on "skip-all".