Back in the olden times game development studios used to do this. They would pre-estimate the maximum number of everything happening (explosion, ai, ammo, etc)

Back in the olden times game development studios used to do this. They would pre-estimate the maximum number of everything happening (explosion, ai, ammo, etc) and pre allocate everything. Then allocation and deallocations is just a fifo of spaced pointers built on a block of memory pre laid out in a structure in the binary. If you allocate 2x the memory you need then there's no risk of overflows. It's riskier but it makes all of the code dead simple, extremely fast, and is a good middleground between embedded and normal. You do get large binaries though...