C doesn't have exceptions, do you mean signals? If not, I don't see how that is that any different from having to handle I/O errors from write() and/or open() calls.
tldr; it's very different.
I'm unclear what would happen in the event you had configured the mask to force SIGBUS to a different thread. Presumably undefined behavior.
> If multiple standard signals are pending for a process, the order in which the signals are delivered is unspecified.
That could create the mother of all edgecases if a different signal handler assumed the variable you just failed to read into was in a valid state. More fun footguns I guess.
If you are using mmap like malloc (as the article does) you don't necessarily know that you are "reading" from disk. You may have passed the disk-backed pointers to other code. The fact that malloc and mmap return the same type of values is what makes mmap in C so powerful AND so prone to issues.