[mjw1007]

At a minimum there'd have to have been a free-as-in-beer cross-platform compiler.

I think Ada had a brief chance to take off around 2000 when gnat was added to the main gcc distribution, but the GNU maintainer was also the head of Ada Core Technologies and had very little interest in making the free version of the compiler useful for general purpose programming.

I wrote a few small things using it, but the "ecosystem" just wasn't there, and there was nobody trying to coordinate a community that might have built it up.

Even calling libc functions that didn't correspond to anything in the Ada standard library was no fun at all.

[nunuvit]

> but the "ecosystem" just wasn't there

I don't think it ever will be, either. Ada's "ecosystem" is really the tooling. I've seen plenty of Ada, but there's always been zero (or very nearly zero) exchange of code into or out of the company. There's not much opportunity to grow a natural ecosystem like that. The tooling for C and C++ is catching up, facilitating model-based design code generation, which is the direction Ada's niche is heading. Ada didn't entrench itself as a target language early on, missing another chance to surge in popularity.