I'm guessing this is common API design in the world of C libraries? Coming from Swift / other high-level languages, it seems awfully error-prone to have to call

I'm guessing this is common API design in the world of C libraries? Coming from Swift / other high-level languages, it seems awfully error-prone to have to call an API multiple times, sometimes with null arguments, sometimes with pointers to buffers that hopefully are the right size, just to process some data. Programmer errors / misinterpretation of the documentation leading to programmer errors seems inevitable.