pslam basically did in his next paragraph:

> If this project really did require re-inventing C++ in C, it must be justified by being fairly large. In which case, a low-end ARM (Cortex M based) microcontroller would have been entirely suitable. All ARMs have multiple C++ toolchains which support them.

ARM is not entirely suitable for any application just because you have complex (for some definition of complex) software.

No, but the software impact of choosing a particular piece of hardware should absolutely be part of the system design process. If it is not, then you are part of a project with bad leadership, or very, very old-fashioned architects.

It's not just ARM - there's plenty of other CPU architectures with modern Clang, GCC, or other toolchains with C++ support. Given that this is a large code base (justifying this amount of work), this cannot be a "tiny" microcontroller, as in 8 bit, and needing to run on microamps. I cannot believe that there were not C++-capable microcontrollers available which would have done the job, without breaking the bank.

Doing it at lowest cost is the point. Because even if you don't lower your cost, your competitors will.