You can live entirely without malloc(). You don't need it. You can even allocate memory dynamically without malloc, just call a different API. On Windows, it's

You can live entirely without malloc(). You don't need it. You can even allocate memory dynamically without malloc, just call a different API. On Windows, it's typical to use e.g. VirtualAlloc(). So thinking of malloc as runtime seems extremely strange to me. libc is not the only library that has "global state". There is nothing special about it. You don't need libc (yes, some compilers / platforms somewhat expect you to bundle libc). And malloc is not libc, although some of the functionality in libc uses malloc internally / gives you back memory that you are expected to free().