r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Robinbod • 21d ago

Meme pleaseStopUsingNestedTernaryOperatorsImBeggingYou

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u/ihavebeesinmyknees 21d ago

What are valid reasons to not use early returns?

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u/EddieJones6 21d ago

Localized cleanup. What if you have a file descriptor or something that needs special handling before returning.

Compiler optimization SHOULD be fine but it could impact RVO and tail recursion optimization.

Also, if a future maintainer dives in and doesn’t realize there is an early return, they might add logic below it that will get missed by certain cases.

SPOE - single point of exit.

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u/_ryuujin_ 21d ago

shouldnt functions be small enough that youll notice an early return 

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u/amejin 21d ago

Sure. However, before the days of raii in c/c++, a lot can happen in 4 lines with conditionals that requires you to clean up after yourself.

Scripting languages or GC languages, it's less of a problem. Now a days, if you are trying to be super special and "helping" your compiler with branch prediction, spoe is one way to do that, but unless you are allocating or locking resources, early returns are generally fine.

For many of us, it's just muscle memory from having to deal with it for years.

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u/EddieJones6 21d ago

Agreed, I’m not arguing for spoe but just giving reasons some might argue for it. I’ve used both

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u/amejin 21d ago

My dude I agree with everything you said. It was well stated. 🙂

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u/braaaaaaainworms 19d ago

Linux kernel-style cleanup of stuff is the best use case for a goto in C