Someone recently made the point to me that a lot of dynamic situations can be rewritten as locally static allocations with proper continuations. The idea being that you re-enter the continuation with more memory when you've exhausted your existing pools. The problems are obvious, but it's a neat middle ground.

The simplest example being a stack buffer that expands to a heap allocation when required. There is an API pattern to facilitate this: when the size of the provided "out" buffer is insufficient to hold the result, return an appropriate error code and populate an out parameter with the required size. So you try once with the stack buffer, and if that fails, retry after allocating a heap buffer of precisely the required size. We used this pattern everywhere in Windows dev.