In my opinion error handling in C is great. It forces you to actually think about it, deal with them as close as possible and makes you write it in a forward compatible way. Much better than exceptions were you never no what one might throw in another version.

> The barebones-macro-system?

The CPP is a different language and designed that way so you can use another language that suits you better, most don't do that, because the default is fine.