[kazinator]

Actually I have to apologize to the GOTO somewhat. Semaphores are worse than GOTO.

Dijkstra didn't understand that GOTO is equivalent to tail recursion. The way you untangle the spaghetti of a GOTO graph with shared variables is to divide it into basic blocks, and turn them into pure tail-calling functions. The assignments to shared variables become argument passing. From there you might be able to identify some meaning in those functions.

The GOTO is also a fundamental block in that you can use conditionals and goto as a target language for higher level constructs --- and this is clear and efficient.

Semaphore API calls are a horrible target language for implementing other synchronization primitives. They are too encapsulated: each semaphore is a tiny mutex protecting only a counter. So then you face an abstraction inversion right away: to protect anything else, you're using a tiny mutex which protects a counter, plus that counter, as a bigger mutex.

I currently work in a codebase which carries its won semaphore, which is used a lot. The implementation is a POSIX mutex, condition variable and counter! Ouch, that hurts. It's more regressive than a tax that takes money from single moms to give a corporation a break.