Comment by adinisom
Yes, 100%. State transitions are "goto" by another name. State machines have their place but tend to be write-only (hard to read and modify) so are ideally small and few. Worked at a place that drank Miro Samek's "Practical Statecharts in C/C++" kool-aid... caused lots of problems. So instead I use this pattern everywhere that I can linearize control flow. And if I need a state machine with this pattern I can just use goto.
Agreed re: making the state a static variable inside the function. Great for simple coroutines. I made it a pointer in the example for two reasons:
- Demonstrates access to the state variables with very little visual noise... "s->"
- For sub-coroutines that can be called from multiple places such as "delay" you make the state variable the first argument. The caller's state contains the sub-coroutine's state and the caller passes it to the sub-coroutine. The top level coroutine's state ends up becoming "the stack" allocated at compile-time.
Worked at a place that drank hiearchical state machines kool-aid. Yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_state_machine#Hierarchical...