Comment by __david__

Nothing you said is incorrect, but I believe they meant that there’s no way to force a C program to check the NULL correctly—the compiler will happily compile code that gets a pointer back from a function but doesn’t check for NULL before dereferencing it. In something like Rust the type system won’t let you touch the value until you’ve done something to deal with the error. Even if you just want to ignore it, you are forced to acknowledge that the function is fallible by the type system—it’s a compile error if you don’t.