As you noted /dev/log doesn't exist on macOS (the correct path is /var/run/syslog).

I guess the change that would be most in spirit of the comment is to set self.socket to None when the socket cannot be opened and test for that before closing the socket.  Likewise, emit() can test if self.socket is None and then attempt to open the socket (and not write to the log when the socket still is None)

This makes errors pass silently, but does match the spirit of the POSIX API (where the syslog function does not return an error).