You'd get normal errno/out param semantics if you had access to semantic struct unpacking. But you don't. Even then, composing optional values in C has always b

You'd get normal errno/out param semantics if you had access to semantic struct unpacking. But you don't. Even then, composing optional values in C has always been a bit of a pain. If you're not doing exceptions, your two choices seem to be exceptions and monads in every language, and neither work in C, or would even be compatible with the philosophy that most C programmers have. I guess you could attempt to pull some kind of macro but it only works on simple one-to-the-other calls. C++ optionals, as terrible as C++ is, are certainly more fun to use than if(foo(x,y, out1, out2) != WHATEVER_LIBRARY_OK) { ... }