[clarry]

One of the things with tight memory systems is that you don't use malloc to begin with, if you can avoid it. C gives you the option.

When you're concatenating strings, you already have storage for those strings. Maybe you can re-use that storage. Maybe you have a static buffer. Maybe you have a fixed size buffer on the stack and the stack use is bounded.

A language that forces you into making redundant duplicates onto the heap is terrible in these situations.

And yes there are programs that try to deal with failing mallocs. Again, C gives you the option.