C lacks nothing in machine code, and exception handling was and is commonplace in C with setjmp and longjmp.
The reason for the complete lack of a language-level feature in purely procedural languages is that exception handling is identical to setjmp when no destructors need to be called. Exception handling has been around before in exotic languages, but never caught on because it was purely syntactic sugar. However, once destructors entered the scene and stack unwinding became necessary, language-level support became necessary and exception handling was widely implemented as part of the language.