There are some old-hand approaches to this which work out fine. An example would be a generous rolling buffer, with enough room for the data you're working on.

There are some old-hand approaches to this which work out fine. An example would be a generous rolling buffer, with enough room for the data you're working on. Most tools which are working on a stream of data don't require much memory, they're either doing a peephole transformation or building up data with filtration and aggregation, or some combination. You can't have a use-after-free bug if you never call free, treating the OS as your garbage collector for memory (not other resources please) is fine.