[eps]

Sticking defer under the var declaration is clever, but it doesn't look an improvement in terms of the code quality to me. It trades verbosity of the "out:" pattern for the need to register the cleanup code before the acquisition code. That's just weird. It's not complicated, just... backwards. Almost like a solution in search of a problem :)

[foxfluff]

Dunno, I feel like the goto out pattern is substantially more irritating any time you actually want to return a value from the function. I'd like to just return val instead of int val; /* ... */ ret=val; goto out;