It's been a long time since I've looked seriously at Ada, so my impressions may be out of date, but here they are anyway...
Ada was essentially the last of the "mainframe" languages, designed in a time where new languages "needed" to be all things for all people, potentially replace all other languages (especially proprietary languages like PL/1), meet the needs of computer scientists, business programmers, and scientific programmers, and (therefore) included vast runtime libraries amd significant dependence on OS services as part of the language definition. Cost was no object - compilers were priced extremely high, but most often were part of multi-million-dollar deals for mainframe installations, or gifts to universities. Personal Computers barely existed, microcontrollers were mask programmed, and either one was laughable for the disk or run-time footprint of a "real language" (You had your assembler and you had your BASIC interpreters...)
There followed a decade or so when the micro and personal computer worlds pretty much ignored anything that had been learned in the Mainframe world, and the mainframe folk seemed to believe that these newcomers were mere toys that wouldn't affect them. Heh. :-(
Time has passed and things are different.
It's nice that Ada is appearing on PCs and in embedded environments. It's nice that the specs have been refined so that it can. It's nice that there's a free OSSW compiler with various targets. I don't know that I'll ever be convinced that "big languages" are inherently better, but it's not an unreasonable experiment, and I applaud the contest.
It says in the GNAT FAQ (
http://libre.adacore.com/tools/gnat-gpl-edition/faq/ ) that the free version of the compiler/etc can ONLY be used to develop free Open Source software (compiler, runtime, and libraries all full GPL, not LGPL or anything.) That seems ... less than attractive.
Quote
>What is the license of the GNAT GPL Edition?
Everything (tools, runtime, libraries) in the GNAT GPL Edition is licensed under the General Public License (GPL). This ensures that executables generated by the GNAT GPL Edition are Free Software and that source code is made available with the executables, giving the freedom to recepients to run, study, modify, adapt, and redistribute sources and executables under the terms of the GPL.
I would like to release my software under the ABC license, which is incompatible with the GPL. What should I do?
If the ABC license is a Free Software license according to the FSF, then read the following Q&A. If the ABC license is not a Free Software license then it is the intention of the GPL distribution of GNAT to restrict your freedom. For distribution of proprietary software, we suggest and recommend the use of GNAT Pro, which, while still being Free Software, comes with more liberal licensing permitting this kind of use.