I wouldn't say this is the reason. Embedded systems typically don't have virtual memory to start. I would expect (but verify) a malloc implementation on embedd

I wouldn't say this is the reason. Embedded systems typically don't have virtual memory to start. I would expect (but verify) a malloc implementation on embedded to return null if it can't satisfy the allocation. But even with that assumption malloc in embedded is often a bad idea. You need to plan for worst case anyway and you can not afford memory fragmentation.