Comment by uecker

In C, you would typically rely much more on tooling to find bugs (but there are different styles and opinions). Checking for null is not bad, but does not usually add anything. If you de-reference a null pointer, you get a segmentation fault (which is safe) and a debugger will give a nice backtrace. So why catch this by writing additional code if the right tool will give you this automatically? A sanitizer could also add such tests automatically.

For a similar reason, it makes sense to use signed integers. A signed overflow sanitizer will find the overflow bugs or safely terminate the program. Finding unsigned wraparound bugs is much harder.