In C you have no exception handling. The closest you can get is seqfualts. With a segfault the debugger can give you a backtrace at almost the exact issue point

In C you have no exception handling. The closest you can get is seqfualts. With a segfault the debugger can give you a backtrace at almost the exact issue point. The easiest way to get segfaults is by dereferencing NULL. In C dereferencing NULL is invalid. Thus returning NULL on failure will result in something close to what raising an exception in other languages does. In any language with real exception handling it makes much less sense, ignoring optimization.