WizenedEE:
Essentially, with the library bug, it's okay to allocate memory as long as you don't expect it back.realloc calls free if the new chunk size is smaller
That would fit my use case, as I don't expect the array to shrink, so probably a malloc() + expand as needed with realloc could be ok.
(I'm thinking about a delItem() method, but that would just "invalidate" an entry or shift everything down 1 position and decrement _count, without shrinking the array).