I once had the pleasure of using the Microsoft C API for creating an HMAC:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/seccrypto/exa...

They managed to mix both patterns into a ghastly 9 function call!

The example above speaks for itself but I kind of see the "we provide you with memory you need to call 'FreeX' on" and the "call the function twice, once to find out how much memory you need to allocate" patterns to be equally annoying to use.