Forgot to mention couple other design decisions:
No new, delete operators in any C++ code.
ISR code was also in C++.
All objects are statically allocated - with 4MB of SRAM, one can easily see why. It allows tightly control memory usage by the developer.
All regression tests are automated. There were test scripts for all functional HW/SW components. Found one bug triggered in 24.9 days time frame (31 bit timer counter wrap around for 10 milliseconds timer call) - from that point on - all firmware release pass 3 months continuous test on multiple systems before release.
Agree with your point: Dev culture matter a lot. This was a mac (powerpc mac) base dev house. C++ was the big thing in the SW (Mac) side of the dev team.
In my career, I worked on 15+ projects - most were embedded system projects. Only two projects are C++. The other project only small subset is C++. On this project - 90% of code base running in target are C++ and full OO design and 80% of the classes reuse from other projects.
