In my experience dynamic allocation is banned in either (a) small embedded environments or (b) high scrutiny environments (soft realtime, safety critical, etc).

In my experience dynamic allocation is banned in either (a) small embedded environments or (b) high scrutiny environments (soft realtime, safety critical, etc). In both cases the project size is small enough, or the scrutiny is high enough that the ad-hoc allocator doesn't develop. The environment is also simple enough that the memory cheats you're thinking of don't exist (or you can squash them by touching all allocated memory up front).