[TickleSteve]

Safety-critical systems imply a lot more than that, been there, done that.

Its an accepted, general premise in embedded systems to always avoid dynamic behaviour, that includes memory allocation, storage behaviour, etc. Implying that that kind of behaviour is only for safety-critical systems is not correct, its mainly for robustness and simplicity reasons. I would argue that it applies to the vast majority of embedded systems (prototypes excepted).

An embedded system is also (generalising again here) always single-purpose. By definition its a part of another system and you do not interact with the device itself, you interact with the system.

You could argue that not all embedded systems are resource-constrained (again, been there, done that). but typically for this level of system (i.e. microcontroller based), if you're not resource-constrained, you've not optimised your BOM cost and hence you're in prototype stage.