your programs have a data segment. its not the heap nor the stack... and it can be (depending on loader/linker) a source of reliable object->address mappings as its not dynamically populated.
That sounds like your answer is: "Yes, global variables".
That may be a perfectly good solution in many embedded environments, but in most other context's global variables are considered bad design or very limiting and impractical.
Even global mutable variables are a problem only because they lend to spaghetti code and messy state handling if you use them in multiple places. But you could just... make a global variable and then handle it like you would a variable init with malloc. No functional issue there.
