[SideburnsOfDoom]

The "Avoid Else, Return Early" blog post above appears to be about JavasScript code, which (along with Java, C#, Python, Ruby etc) do not ready do "buffer frees (cleanups)" much. They have other language and runtime mechanisms for this such as GC and try...finally blocks, which work fine with early return.

Yes, in the presence of teardown code at the end of the method, as is common idiom in C, avoid early return. This appears to be the case for apple's "goto fail" code.

However, don't generalise this to all languages.