Back when I used to write a lot more C than I do now, I adopted the practice that if a function is not going to return, its name should have an and_die at the end, unless it's very obvious that it's not going to return (e.g. functions called "fatal", "die", or similar) This makes it impossible to miss. Of course, gcc also has some function attributes you can set that help the compiler optimize more in the case of never-returning functions..