I brought up pointer indirections as a way of illustrating how stringent some of these rules are and what sorts of forces are at play. Sorry for muddying matters.
The point is that you can still do all of that stuff even on staticly allocated memory.
The other limitation in a lot of these systems is the underlying virtual memory system and some times there isn't one. Memory fragmentation issues are a huge problem when you have a couple kB to a few MB of physical RAM and a limited VM subsystem.
