Proprietary compilers, some limitations in the type system meant the standard library wasn't as useful even though it is a safer language as a result. The verbosity also turned me of initially.

It was also a bit of a PITA before Ada'95 and by which time C had won.

C and C++ also only had proprietary compilers, mostly.

However both were born alongside UNIX and that helped C++ to be quickly adopted by all major C compiler vendors, whereas Ada was always something extra to pay on top.

When targeting UNIX, with C and C++ compilers on the box, who is going to pay extra for the Ada compiler unless required to do so?

> C and C++ also only had proprietary compilers, mostly.

I was thinking more in the 90s where GNU already had a freely available C compiler, but GNAT didn't get a free version until the late 90s, and even then it was built on a fork of gcc you had to download separately until like 2000. It was just a lot of work to get up and running, as opposed to the bundling of C/C++ compilers with Linux that was common, as you say. The initial C compatibility helped C++ a lot too.

GCC only took off because Sun decided to split their UNIX into user and developer editions, and other UNIX vendors followed.

Still same rule applies, when a UNIX shop paid for UNIX developer tooling, usually languages like Ada and Modula-2 weren't in the box, you needed to pay extra.

Ada has some really good synchronization primitives, I don’t know if that would have helped here as I haven’t looked at the problem that closely. I work at a much higher level so I lack the experience at this level. Ada was phased out for C++ primarily because the devs are cheaper.

It very much does. Ada has been designed for safety and concurrency, and for environments where failure is something to avoid at all costs.

However, it still has issues of its own; no language is perfect and the best-suited for all use cases.