question on common error-handling idiom

[Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com>]

There's something I've been wondering about for a while.  There is a lot of code 
in linux that looks something like this:


err = -ERRORCODE
if (error condition)
	goto out;


While nice to read, it would seem that it might be more efficient to do the 
following:

if (error condition) {
	err = -ERRORCODE;
	goto out;
}


Is there any particular reason why the former is preferred?  Is the compiler 
smart enough to optimize away the additional write in the non-error path?

Chris