The popularity of a programming language is not always about what the language offers. I would say a comprehensive, well-documented, mature set of standard libraries for its target audience is far more important (notable examples like R, Python, and Go). Last time I checked, Ada doesn’t even have a de facto, high quality TLS/crypto library, let alone various essential protocol/format codecs, yet the core team (AdaCore I assume) puts a lot of resources into offering a few sophisticated flagship IDEs that potential hobbyists would never use (they already have vim, emacs or vscode). I understand that as a business they have to sell something for revenue and they cannot sell standard libraries. So, that’s probably a dilemma that we cannot have the nice things for Ada to take off.
There's some thick bindings to libtls that coincidentally happen to be written by the author of the article. There's also some OpenSSL bindings in Dmitry Kazakov's Simple Components and some in Ada Web Server by AdaCore, although they're pretty minimal.
I think most applications of Ada are in embedded systems where you don't often want anything not in the standard library.
> I think most applications of Ada are in embedded systems...
Ada is heavily used and carries a historical influence not only with embedded software space, but also with hardware space: VHDL is one of the two major hardware description languages used in ASIC design and FPGA implementations. (The other language is Verilog, based on - you guessed it - C, because of its popularity.)
"Due to the Department of Defense requiring as much of the syntax as possible to be based on Ada, in order to avoid re-inventing concepts that had already been thoroughly tested in the development of Ada, VHDL borrows heavily from the Ada programming language in both concept and syntax." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#History
Also a package manager - Rust's is excellent and a huge reason to use it over C/C++. I see Ada has Alire but that seems like a fairly recent development and I don't know how it compares.
Very few of which are needed or even wanted for lower level mcu development. I assume when the gp was talking about spinning things they were talking about ESC software.
