[someengineer]

A common pattern in embedded C is to use something like "goto fail" instead of assert, wrap your function calls in this sort of macro, and then do error handling in one place at the end of the function.

Apparently Apple is unaware of this technique...

[to3m]

I use that style too, but I've not found it useful for OpenGL. When you're developing your product, you want every OpenGL error to explode in your face, so you know it happened. In your final build, you probably won't ever check, because... well, what will you do if something happens? OpenGL errors are much more like ENOMEM than they are like ENOENT, and if you get one in production, you're basically stuffed. The best thing you can do is just carry on and hope that the driver ignores it correctly! (One advantage to working on code whose primary purpose is merely to display something on the screen: you can do stuff like that, and it's OK.)

There are exceptions to this general rule, and sometimes you do need to use glGetError in the normal run of things, and take action based on the result. But they are very much exceptions.

[stephenmm]

Okay, so as someone who is ramping up on C where would I go to learn all these common patterns? I could start going through github repos and start reading code but this seems very inefficient and I might pick up something that is actually a bad technique.

[glassx]

I like Zed Shaw's Debug Macros. Actually his whole book is great.

http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ex20.html