[pjmlp]

More than price, what really hindered Ada was lack of adoption by popular OS vendors and hardware requirements for the early compilers.

Back in the day everyone was paying for compilers, the prices were the normal ones for the target audience.

Rational Software first product was an advanced Ada Machine, providing an early 80's InteliJ experience. Which followed the same fate as all special purpose computers.

UNIX, mainframe and other enterprise OS vendors that eventually provided an Ada compiler, treated it as second class citizen in regard to their main systems programming language.

Home computers lacked the required hardware to implement a proprer Ada compiler.

A systems programming language really needs to be "the language" an OS vendor SDK requires, otherwise it becomes just another application language that can also go low level.

Besides Ada Core, there are a few embedded and real time OS vendors providing Ada compilers.

[e12e]

> Home computers lacked the required hardware to implement a proprer Ada compiler.

Could you elaborate? Are you thinking 80s home computers like the Amiga 1000, or more classical PCs?

[pjmlp]

Both, from the Spectrum days up to the time we could get them to run on 32 bits.

On those days I and many older than me were still writing business applications in Assembly. Compilers for higher level languages were constrained in what they could achieve in the amount of memory that was available.

And Ada did required lots of it. Funny enough I would bet modern Ada compilers are less resource intensive than C++ ones.