If you want to get nitpicky, you could also say there is performance cost to jumping into libc.so for free, then having it do a null check for you, then jump back to your code.  Maybe that&#x27;s worse than doing the null check more &quot;locally&quot;.<p>But I do make a point whenever I&#x27;m writing C, if I write a cleanup function for a new type of struct or whatever, cleaning up null is always a no-op.  It just makes life slightly less tedious.  Having to remember which functions do this and which don&#x27;t, I&#x27;ll admit, is annoying.